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| Rash of Violence Disrupts San Quentin's Death Row |
| By New York Times |
| Published: 06/04/2001 |
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In the last 18 months, in what San Quentin officials and advocates for prisoners call an unprecedented breach of conduct, a group of death row inmates have become increasingly hostile and violent. Classified as Grade B's for their unruly behavior and gang affiliations and housed apart from other death row prisoners in a three-story building, the Adjustment Center, these inmates have attacked officers 67 times in a year and a half, triple the rate of attacks by Grade B prisoners just a few years ago, say officials at San Quentin, which is just north of San Francisco, in Marin County. Of the 85 Grade B inmates, 45 have been involved in assaults or attempted assaults on officers in the last year, officials say. They have slashed the wrists of officers with crude, homemade razors; thrown spears fashioned from paper clips; kicked officers; and increased the number of 'gassings' - throwing stored, fermented feces and urine in an officer's face - officials say. The California Department of Corrections, and San Quentin officials in particular, contend that disruptive death row prisoners should be locked up at some other prison. Given San Quentin's age and lack of a modern security system, like a remote electronic locking system for the cells or Plexiglas doors, officers are at a disadvantage dealing with inmates who have decided they have nothing left to lose, prison officials say. The officials have enlisted a local assemblyman, Joe Nation, a Democrat from San Rafael, to draft a bill that would lift the requirement that San Quentin house all male death row inmates. (The state's 12 women on death row are housed at Chowchilla.) The bill has passed its first committee in the California Assembly and is expected to get a full vote in about three weeks. 'The facility is antiquated, and death row is antiquated,' Russ Heimerich, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections, said. 'It only makes sense.' Advocates for prisoners disagree. They say some of the tension on death row in the last year was created when San Quentin suspended visiting rights for the condemned for a year after the gang-related stabbing of one inmate by another in the visitation center. (Visits have been reinstated for Grade A condemned prisoners, with each inmate and his visitors placed in a glass-walled cell, rather than in a large room with other inmates and guests.) More tension was created among the Grade B prisoners when their outdoor exercise was suspended for several months after another attack on an inmate by a fellow prisoner. |
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He has blue eyes. Cold like steel. His legs are wide. Like tree trunks. And he has a shock of red hair, red, like the fires of hell. Hamilton Lindley His antics were known from town to town as he was a droll card and often known as a droll farceur. with his madcap pantaloon is a zany adventurer and a cavorter with a motley troupe of buffoons.