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| Entrance to San Quentin's Death Row |
“For this is my body, which will be given up for you.”
Saying these words, I lift up the host for the men inside the cage to see.
The “chapel” in San Quentin State Prison’s Death Row is a windowless old shower room encased in a heavy metal cage. Inside it there are 6 wooden benches bolted to the floor upon which the members of my congregation sit. I stand, wearing both priestly vestments and a black stab-proof vest, inside my own cage, which is about twice the size of an old phone booth. As required by the department I have padlocked myself inside. All this makes me, to my knowledge, the only Jesuit in my community who regularly celebrates Mass in a Kevlar vest.
There is a harsh florescent light overhead, and as I raise the consecrated host the light illuminates it. I look past the host to the men in the cage. They are quiet and focused. It’s at this point of the Mass that I often imagine, as I am standing there facing them, separated by the steel mesh, that the light of Christ is streaming forth from that host, dispelling the dark shadows of “East Block” – San Quentin’s Death Row for men.
Death Row, perhaps surprisingly, is not very noisy. The loudest (and most annoying) noise is the incessant intercom at the guard’s station calling the Tier Officers to bring inmates to and from visits, medical appointments, or the shower.
Each man has his own cell. Windowless, fronted by the same kind of heavy metal mesh, a barred door and a food slot with a cover that is padlocked shut most of the time, each cell measures 5 feet wide by about 10 feet deep. The cells are dark and cramped. At the back of the cell, at about eye level, there is a shelf, below it a stainless steel toilet with a stainless steel sink built into the top of it. A small, round metal stool is built into one wall, and in front of the stool is a bed. Most of the men take the thin, 1-inch thick cotton mattress and put it on the floor to sleep. They use the flat metal platform of the bed as a desk instead. All the men have small televisions, which are always on, and which provide them their only view of the outside world.
Death Row smells like a locker room mixed with a cafeteria mixed with an outhouse. As you walk past the cells, the smell of a recent bowel movement blends nauseatingly with the smell of a neighbor cooking rice and beans in a hot pot.
Source: The Jesuit Post, George Williams SJ, July 23, 2012