California Deactivates 46 Housing Units at 15 Prisons: Activists Celebrate, Prisoners Cringe
by Kelton P O’Connor
On April 20, I awake to a silent cell block… 800 men sleeping their prison sentences away. I’m a heavy sleeper and after 16 years of eating breakfast at dawn, I still have a hard time waking up on time. As I am wondering why I suddenly feel so awake at this hour a thudding of fists tumbles out of the darkness, punctuated by a harrumph and a clatter of belongings across concrete floor.
When a cell fight breaks out, nearby neighbors usually hear an argument or other preamble, but this outbreak has arrived without warning, and at such a dim hour I can’t help but wonder if it’s not a scuffle, but an attempted rape or a murder in the making.
Fistfall fades quickly, giving way to long moans, and my stomach turns at the thought of having to listen to yet another rape… but that thought is quickly brought into question by a gurgling, wheezing sound that might mean one of my downstairs neighbors is getting 
strangled by his cellmate.
No doubt this clamor is wakening the neighborhood, but it is not loud enough to reach the ears of the night guards who sit behind a desk at the other end of the cellblock. Listening neighbors will abide by the Code of Silence, unless one of the combatants calls for help. If someone calls for help, neighbors will immediately amplify the SOS by yelling, “Man down!” But until consent is given the rule is to allow the fight, rape, or murder to proceed.
However, what if someone is being strangled and can’t call for help? What then? Am I listening to exactly that situation right now? There is no way for me to be certain, and if I call for help without consent, and I misjudge the situation, I could easily make an enemy of the man I mean to help… As this thought crosses my mind sounds of struggle cease.
Was that the critical moment? Has every neighbor who hesitated, myself included, now participated by acquiescence in a midnight killing?
My ears strain for proof of continued struggle, the moments drag out, and finally a few hasty curses and thuds emanate, followed by a single, labored wheezy word.
“Emergency…” the voice struggles to say.
Another voice from a neighboring cell asks, “What cell are you in?” “276”, the man says.
“Consent given”, a host of voices fills the night. “Man down, 276”
“Man down, 276”
“Man down, 276”
Men in cells on the other side of the cell block join in, passing the alarm along. “Man down, 276”
“Man down, 276”
The faint jangle of keys on belts announces the approach of guards.
“He’s killing me…” the voice says quietly now. “Help… help… he’s killing me…” “Hey! Hurry the fuck up! This is serious!” someone yells at the guards.
My cell is a floor above the fight, so I can’t see the officers arriving, but as soon as they arrive the man under attack urges the officers to, “Get the knife.”
An officer starts bellowing, “Stop, get off of him! Hey, stop that!” but he can do nothing other than yell until the cell door is opened, and the door can’t be opened until another officer at the end of the tier finds the right key, unlocks a padlock, and then throws a lever.
“Hey, hurry the fuck up!” the officer at the cell front yells to the officer who’s working to throw the lever.
Hundreds of men now lay awake in bed, listening and waiting, wondering if this poor bastard will be able to hold out for another critical couple of minutes or if he will be murdered with help looking on only a few feet away unable to reach him through the bars of his cell.
Finally there is a sound of steel sliding on steel, a door swinging open, a clash of shouts, the spicy tang of pepper spray wafts through the cellblock, and the scene becomes too muddled to know what’s happening by ear. When the chaos subsides a nurse is heard speaking to the man who was attacked and from the sound of it he will survive his wounds.
Later in the day the details are sleuthed out, one piece at a time, as neighbors trade their respective snatches of the nightmare. Larry caught glimpses through a shaving mirror, which he shoved through the bars of his cell so he could peer down the tier to see the officers drag both men out of their cell – one clinging to the other, stabbing his cellmate in the face even while the guards beat him and pried them apart.
Others got a better look at the survivor as guards walked him by their cellfronts, handcuffed, missing an ear, covered in blood and caustic orange spray.
***
This may sound like a story about a kind of violence between cellmates that is just an unavoidable fact of prison life. But it’s actually a story about a kind of violence that only occurs in prisons that force incarcerated people to live in close quarters together – two people to a cell. Many prisons around the world do not force incarcerated people to “double-cell”. And when incarcerated people are each given their own cell, no one gets beaten, raped, or murdered by their cellmate in the middle of the night, because no one has a cellmate.
Prior to the era of mass incarceration many US prisons housed only one person per cell, but as the human warehousing industry grew, space efficiency spurred a shift toward housing multiple prisoners per cell. Biased research generated at that time suggested there were no harms associated with double- celling, but evidence has sense emerged exposing the truth. In 2020 some jails switched from a double- cell standard to a single-cell standard and found that rates of violence dropped dramatically. In Seattle, Washington, the King County jail witnessed a 67% drop in fights and assaults. This confirms what incarcerated people have always said: When you have a cell mate, the simple act of going to sleep is not always safe.
A campaign to ban double-celling in California should be a winnable fight. Not only is it a clear cut matter of human rights, it will also reduce prison capacity and exert a decarceral pressure on the entire prison system.
No state-wide ban has been proposed, but in the White Paper transforming San Quentin Governor Newsom’s advisory board states, “We strongly recommend eliminating mandatory double-celling.” The advisory board said they recommend San Quentin shift to a one person per cell housing standard because, “people cannot transform their lives when they are in survival mode.”
San Quentin residents overwhelmingly support the recommendations forwarded in the governor’s White Paper – from improved food quality to the retraining of officers into roles that are more social than correctional – but few of the paper’s recommendations are as popular as the call for a shift to single-celling. If this recommendation were implemented statewide no one would have to fight for their life in the middle of the night or be happy they only lost an ear.
Transitioning the entire prison system onto a one person per cell housing standard would need to occur in a staged process, because there are presently over 90,000 people in California prisons and only 15,000 empty beds. But the state’s prison population is projected to fall for years to come, so the transition to a single-cell standard could be achieved over time. Unfortunately, the loudest voices in
California’s justice movement presently refuse to prioritize reductions in population density. Instead they are rushing to close facilities, blocking the path to a single-cell standard, and at the cost of further overcrowding remaining prisons.
Specifically, the CURB Coalition has been pushing the state to close five prisons, on the grounds that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) is operating 15,000 empty prison beds. While CURB sees these beds as nothing but institutional bloat, when incarcerated people look at 15,000 empty beds, we see peace of mind and safety. Many of us see the possibility of taking five prisons off of the double-cell standard.
Importantly, most of these empty bunks do not represent empty cells. They represent prisoners sharing a cell with no one but an empty bunk, who are grateful to live alone. Those empty beds are safety cushions and for many people the most prized possession they will have while they are incarcerated.
If activists want to reduce CDCR’s housing capacity these beds can be eliminated, without exposing incarcerated people to harm, simply by removing one bed per cell, leaving behind a single bed in each of 15,000 cells. This will feel anticlimactic to activists who long for the prison system to shrink in more symbolic ways. But the capacity of the prison system is reduced just as surely by pulling beds as by closing facilities, and this way rates of violence would be driven down, rather than up.
If, however, all those beds are to be converted into prison closures, thousands of prisoners will lose the safety of a cell to themselves and be forced into cells with others. This is exactly the direction the state is now moving, as a result of CURB’s closure campaign. While the state has rejected CURB’s request to slate five more facilities for closure, the campaign appears to have achieved the worst of both worlds, because the state has agreed to deactivate 46 housing units in 13 prisons. This means everyone living in cellblocks scheduled for deactivation will now get shoved into other cellblocks which are already over- full. In short, CURB got none of the actual closures they asked for but all of the prison overcrowding and harm of closures.
In most cellblocks people who end up living on their own are the ones who refuse to live peacefully with others, or those who are unusually vulnerable. This means that violence does not just rise steadily as prisons fill up but rises more sharply the closer the system gets to being completely full. Due to CURB’s efforts we may soon start to reach thresholds that precipitate more serious violence.
It’s time that CURB, and other prison closure activists, start to remember that it is not empty prison beds that are the problem, but the ones that have people in them. It’s time to ask, are we fighting against buildings, or are we fighting for liberty? The answer to that question will dictate completely different policy strategies. The top priority should be to reduce prison populations, and to do so compassionately. Prison closure campaigns do neither of these things.
In CURB’s Prison Closure Roadmap a lot of ink is wasted on the argument that the process of transferring prisoners from one prison to another is so harmful that when prisons are closed
incarcerated people should not be transferred to another prison, but instead should be set free… without regard to completion of sentence. This proposal is not moveable. When COVID was killing scores of incarcerated people, and a judge was weeping openly on the bench, not a single person was released. So the idea that US courts would ever order mass releases simply to avoid exposing people to bus rides and changes of address is ridiculous.
Prison closures may provide activists with symbolic victories, but if they are not preceded by a shift to a single-cell housing standard and by adequate population reductions, their impact can only be measured in terms of beatings, rapes, and murders. So, for the time being, prison closure campaigns are harmful to incarcerated people. We must abandon the obsession with purely symbolic victories over infrastructure and adopt a clear cut focus on Compassionate Decarceration. This will require we prioritize the reduction of prison populations, and the reduction of population density, over all else.
If we win the fight for population reduction, prison closures will eventually follow. But if we lose the fight for population reduction recent facility closures and unit deactivations will mean nothing. The state will simply reactivate and reopen everything.
Kelton P. O’Connor is incarcerated at San Quentin
