New Lease on Life for San Quentin

SACRAMENTO -- In an abrupt reversal, the state has commuted the death penalty for California’s famous San Quentin prison, deciding instead to modernize the aging fortress and build new facilities for condemned killers.

Confronted with the high cost of constructing replacement prisons and potential delays that could stretch as long as 10 years, corrections officials acknowledged Thursday that they have decided to give San Quentin a new lease on life.

“It’s looking more and more like we will stay at San Quentin,” said Stephen Green, assistant secretary of the Youth and Adult Correctional Agency. “The more we looked at the numbers for decommissioning San Quentin and building replacement facilities, the more expensive those projects seemed to be.”

The decision was a surprise turnaround for state officials who had pushed for years to shut down the 150-year-old, red-roofed prison whose decaying buildings require constant and costly maintenance.

With its 600 condemned inmates, the prison’s death row outgrew its quarters long ago and is severely overcrowded.

Green said that although there has never been an escape from death row, its obsolete design raises continual worries about security and guard safety. The exercise yard, for instance, is enclosed with a wall about 35 feet from the shoreline--a design that would never be found in a modern prison.

In 2000, Green added, two condemned inmates were able to hide behind a shower facility before being discovered with a rope ladder and a hand-drawn map of the area immediately outside the walls.

And in another incident, two prisoners breached a control room in an apparent effort to take hostages. Green said they were subdued because there were five correctional officers in the control room at that time, instead of the two who are normally on duty there.

Adding to the clamor to close the prison were local officials and developers, who envisioned housing projects or civic facilities on the 432 acres of waterfront real estate on San Francisco Bay in Marin County.

But instead of moving death row inmates to other maximum-security facilities and constructing new prisons to house the others at San Quentin, Green said state officials have come up with a plan: build a new modern death row on the site and rehabilitate the remaining buildings for minimum-security prisoners.

He said the proposal still has to be presented to the Legislature and the governor for approval.

One key lawmaker, Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco), already likes the idea.

“It probably makes more sense than trying to build a new prison,” Burton said Thursday. “There were no easy answers. This is probably the best of the solutions, although in Marin County everybody had their eyes on that property.”

Burton said he had not objected to the closure but had fought plans to move Death Row inmates to out-of-the-way facilities. With capital punishment such a controversial issue, he said death rows should be located “close to lawyers, close to the media and close to those who want to protest for or against it.”

Burton, who personally opposes the death penalty, said those criteria left the state prison in Folsom as the only other logical site, but local residents there “weren’t too crazy about that idea.”

The new solution, “very” tentatively estimated by Green to cost $199 million, calls for the construction of two facilities at San Quentin designed to house 968 death row inmates. The complex on the west side of the property, commonly called “the ranch,” would include a new death chamber and a medical facility so condemned prisoners would no longer be taken to local hospitals when there is a serious injury or illness.

The portion of San Quentin that serves as a reception center for new inmates would be rehabilitated and converted to housing for minimum-security prisoners. Its reception function would be taken over by California State Prison Solano in Vacaville.

Assemblyman Joe Nation (D-San Rafael) said he had not seen the proposal but noted that past estimates predicted the cost of renovating the prison would far exceed the cost of replacing it with new facilities.

“The fact is, this facility houses the most violent criminals in California in an urban area, and it’s not a safe facility,” said Nation, whose district includes the prison. “The status quo won’t work, but the state is facing a $20-billion shortfall, and we need to be sure that whatever we do is in the best interests of the taxpayers.”