had for him. “He had his head on straight,” Isom said. “He was personable.” After more than a year locked down, an exhausted population at San Quentin had quit wondering when relief would come. That’s what epidemiologist Dr. Meghan Morris saw when she visited the prison in April, 2021. On May 26, 2021, testifying as an expert witness in a Marin County Superior Court evidentiary hearing in a habeas corpus proceeding, she said, “I was really struck at how quiet it was, and it actually felt very eerie to me. The general feeling in the space was not energetic. It was the opposite. I saw men just lying there. You could feel kind of there was just a sense of kind of hopelessness. That was the word I used. Nobody said that to me. That was just the impression that I had when I was walking through.”
Aftermath
Through gradual attrition San Quentin’s population fell to 2,384 by the time the prison reopened on May 5, 2021. To its residents this number seemed a reasonable match for the facility. Since then the figure has been creeping up: 2,418 on May 19, 2,434 on June 2, 2,548 on July 29, and more than 2,700 by September. The prison has design capacity of 3,082, as noted in the evidentiary hearing referenced above. Provisions of a federal receivership allow California’s total prison population to be 137.5% of prison capacity. But individual prisons may have populations well in excess of that ratio, so long as the statewide ratio is maintained. Once the prison reopened, the big buses kept rolling in to San Quentin. The first newcomers were directed to the Alpine section of South Block, where I live. As the population in our section swells, we hear, see and feel the change. The competition for showers and phones has intensified. As we exit the building for chow or Yard, our massed bodies evoke images of crowded street scenes in downtown New York. The constant hum of the building, absent only in the middle of the night, increases daily as our numbers grow. At times the noise reaches a deafening crescendo. We run fans to create white noise. We wear headphones and crank up our music in a vain attempt to escape the cacophony that is the inevitable result of too many people living in a con-
fined concrete and metal space. There is a profound disconnect between what prisoners see and what prison officials see when they consider population density at San Quentin. In the evidentiary hearings referred to above, the Acting Warden was asked if he believed that the prison was overcrowded at the time of the arrival of the fateful buses from Chino in late May. He recalled that at that time, the prison “had roughly 3,992 inmates,” and conceded that the number was over design capacity. But he also said, “I did not believe that San Quentin was overcrowded.” To the men who lived doubled-up in the prison’s tiny cells, who witnessed firsthand the devastating impacts of the crowding on the spread of the virus during the outbreak, such remarks are very difficult to understand. As San Quentin’s population is nudged back to pre-pandemic levels, it can only be hoped that the prison’s ability to protect its residents, as well as their overseers, will not be tested again with such intensity.
HOSPITAL EVENING UNTITLED III By Ed “Foots” Lipman
The Dr. makes a lot of noise when he makes his rounds maybe he thinks that sounds will help us heal The nurse is nice she wants to know how i feel — How can i feel? Here in San Quentin Here in the hospital I don’t bother to smile at her she’ll have to understand when it hurts to stand or walk pretty legs don’t mean a thing.
SAM's AQUA Adventures By Quint Clark
…And they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning shears…
I understand the pruning shears and the plowing shares, I just don’t know what to turn the fish hook into.
FALL 2021 WALL CITY 17
