SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — In the last 18 months, in what prison officials and advocates for prisoners call an unprecedented breach of conduct, a group of inmates on San Quentin's death row have become increasingly hostile and violent.
These inmates have attacked guards 67 times in a year and a half, triple the rate of attacks just a few years ago, say officials at San Quentin.
They have slashed the wrists of guards with crude, homemade razors; thrown spears fashioned from paper clips; kicked guards; 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 prisoners on the largest death row in the Western Hemisphere, with 593 condemned men confined to concrete cells a century and a half old, should be locked up at some other prison.
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.
But advocates for prisoners disagree. They say some of the tension on death row was created when San Quentin temporarily suspended visiting rights and outdoor exercise for the condemned after several inmate-on-inmate attacks.
The advocates also say the prison's proximity to federal and state courts in San Francisco and metropolitan airports gives lawyers and other professionals easier access to prisoners in preparing appeals.
Vernell Crittendon, the public information officer at San Quentin, said the bill would apply to only about half a dozen inmates, "those that are doing the most disruptions."
Because of the attacks, 14 officers requested and received transfers and four have quit, Crittendon said.
Sgt. Robert Trono, who has worked at San Quentin for 18 years, said he could not remember death row inmates ever causing so much trouble.
"There's a lot of gangs," Trono said. "You name them, we've got them."