San Quentin’s infamous East Block, home to the largest death row in the United States, is now empty.
As of May 28, 607 individuals have been transferred from San Quentin’s death row to 20 prisons throughout the state. The remaining 31 people sentenced to death remain at San Quentin, housed in either the Correctional Treatment Center, which provides inpatient health care to those “who need professionally supervised health care that cannot be provided on an outpatient basis,” or in the Psychiatric Inpatient Program, where patients who cannot function adequately or stabilize in an outpatient program or shorter-term inpatient program,” receive intensive treatment, according to CDCR.
CDCR anticipates that all 31 will be discharged at some point and transferred to various state prisons. At that point, the transfer program, which began in January 2020 with volunteers and ended late last month, will be completed, and all 636 individuals sentenced to death in California will be housed in prisons throughout the state.
CDCR says it is considering two options for East Block and its 528 single-person cells. Those options include retrofitting and creating a “mix of improved housing units and appropriate day-use common spaces such as kitchens, study, living room, to promote rehabilitation in the space,” or tearing it down and building “cost-effective, modular housing that meets present-day institutional living standards.”
San Quentin State Prison has officially been renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.