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If you’re serving hard time inside a California prison, you’ll often find yourself stuck in a cramped cell with a complete stranger. You hang a bedsheet to manufacture the semblance of privacy between bed and toilet. Any little thing can erupt into a source of tension and angst – body odor, snoring, lights on or off.

Each moment becomes a test to avoid confrontation or brawling. With no immediate help from officers, the fear and anxiety festers inside you. And day by day, your mental health deteriorates.

“You don’t necessarily know what the capacity of this person is, or like what their crime is,” said Steven Warren, a current resident inside San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. “You’re not told any of that when you’re put in a cell with them.

“I don’t know if this person has the propensity to murder me in my sleep or commit a violent act against me just because they’re feeling some type of way.”

Some California policymakers and prison officials believe it’s time to rethink these potentially harmful housing situations. They contend that offering more single-occupancy cells might serve the best interests of prison residents and public safety.

That’s possible because California’s incarcerated population continues to decline — from its peak of over 173,000 people in 2006 to just under 90,000 today. A handful of prisons have closed, while changes in resentencing and parole eligibility have helped release thousands of individuals.

Under former Gov. Jerry Brown and now Gov. Gavin Newsom, rehabilitation and reentry opportunities remain a growing focal point, too. San Quentin Rehabilitation Center stands at the forefront of the discussion, with an “earned living” housing unit comprised exclusively of single-person cells and plans to similarly repurpose the vacated Death Row buildings. A spokesperson for the prison said it is “working toward” making single-person cells available to all incarcerated people by spring 2026.

A bill advanced in the California Legislature this year aims to establish single-cell units at more prisons. The measure did not make it to Newsom, but it’s expected to return in 2026.

“We want people to have the opportunity to return back to our community, and we want them to do that in the healthiest manner,” said San Francisco District Attorney Brooke Jenkins, who helped draft the legislation.

“You can’t do that if you’re in an environment that causes chaos and stress — or you can’t sleep, you’re having confrontations, you’re irritable because you’re sleeping with one eye open.”

Conversations spark change

Jenkins visited San Quentin numerous times over the last two years and spoke with Warren and others. More importantly, she listened.

“One of the conversations that we had inside with a number of the residents was the cellmate on cellmate violence and all of the issues that come with sharing a cell,” said Jenkins.

She reached out to Assemblymember Damon Connolly, the Democrat representing San Rafael. Together, they authored the Assembly bill that proposes establishing single-occupancy cell pilot programs at four California prisons.

“To properly be able to engage in rehabilitative programming,” states the bill’s text. “Incarcerated persons must be able to sleep without fear of physical harm.”

Prison housing cells at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center on Aug. 14, 2023. Photo courtesy of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Connolly said that single-cell housing units additionally promote safer work environments for corrections officers and staff. “It fits in, in my view, with the larger objectives that the governor and many of us have pursued.”

The state’s prison union agrees with Connolly and Jenkins.

The California Correctional Peace Officers Association in general has supported Newsom’s emphasis on rehabilitation for prisoners, and it has begun lobbying in public against further prison closures.

The 24,500-member union is a player in the Capitol, where it has given $7 million to state lawmakers since 2015, according to the CalMatters Digital Democracy database. It also kicked in $1.75 million to help Newsom defeat the 2021 recall campaign against him, and another $1 million to back Newsom’s 2024 mental health ballot measure.

“The threat of violence and tension in shared cells… fosters conflicts amongst cellmates, necessitating intervention from correctional officers, who place themselves in jeopardy, thereby escalating the overall risk within the facility for all parties involved,” said the California Correctional Peace Officers Association in a support letter to Connolly.

Warren recalled a 2021 situation of cellmate on cellmate violence that he can’t ever forget.

“A young man beat an older gentleman to death in a cell maybe four or five cells down from me,” he said. “It was crazy. After everything was all said and done, there were so many conversations about how these two people shouldn’t be together — about how one person was having an issue with the other person, but (officers) not giving it full regard of the mental health issues.”

A new era of decarceration

Old prisons, such as San Quentin and Folsom, were originally designed to house one person per cell. In response to mass incarceration and overcrowding in the 1990s and early 2000s, the corrections department threw beds into spaces never intended for housing. They had people sleeping in gyms, hallways, and even stairwells.

And they welded and bolted extra bunk beds into almost every single-person cell.

A housing cell at Folsom State Prison on March 14, 2013. Photo courtesy of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation

Decades of prison rights litigation eventually forced the system to address the issue of housing people at 200% design capacity. Two class-action lawsuits, Coleman v. Newsom and Plata v. Newsom, led to federal oversight and a mandated decrease to 137% capacity.

Current housing rates stand at about 120% design capacity, averaged across all 31 state prisons.

Newsom faces some pressure to close more of them. His administration estimates that shutting down one prison saves about $150 million a year, and it’s the only reliable way to actually bring down corrections spending. He has closed four prisons so far — with one more shutdown in the works.

Some advocacy groups and incarcerated individuals opposed Connoly and Jenkins’ bill to provide more single-cell housing. Known as prison abolitionists, these groups want to see as many prisons close as possible. They believe providing more single-cell units could interfere with that agenda.

Kenthi Porter, an incarcerated resident of Ironwood State Prison, submitted a letter to the Legislature through the abolitionist group Initiate Justice that said single cell policies “may reinforce the infrastructure of mass incarceration… by utilizing current excess bed space and providing a pretext for halting future prison closure or expanding existing prison infrastructure.”

Connolly emphasized that the bill does not attempt to legislate on any prison closure decisions.

“The goal here is not to otherwise keep prisons open that are slated to be closed or to reopen closed prisons,” he said. “I fully understand the goal of reducing incarceration that is aligned with the governor’s goal of closing certain prisons. This is not what that is about.”

Jenkins said that closing prisons to accommodate decreasing prison populations amid fiscal budget considerations may not be the best solution.

“Closing prisons is symbolic,” she said. “I don’t think that it represents a true care for the people who are currently incarcerated. I think we have to think about the conditions that they’re in and not symbolic gestures.”

Incentivizing good behavior

One big roadblock that can derail parole and reentry opportunities is the common prison practice of holding both cellmates accountable for the actions of one. When officers find contraband like narcotics, weapons or cell phones in a cell, they commonly issue a disciplinary rules violation report that holds both occupants responsible for the infraction.

“A write-up could be given to you based on the fact that your cellmate was involved in certain activities,” said Warren. “You have to collectively pay for what this person did because, in here, you’re guilty until proven innocent — and most of the time, they usually find us guilty.”

Disciplinary infractions remain part of an incarcerated individual’s permanent record and affect their chances of parole or resentencing. A mistake or exoneration may get documented, but those reports never completely go away.

Jenkins asked San Quentin administration to provide data on the amount of write-ups that occurred within Donner, its single-cell “earned living” unit for residents who demonstrate disciplinary-free conduct.

“San Quentin had over 3,000 write-ups last year, and out of those 3,000, I believe it was seven that came out of Donner,” said Jenkins. “What you see is that it’s working. It’s effective in that it allows the correctional officers who work in that unit to actually be able to have less stress themselves because they know that these inmates are incentivized to behave.”

Erick Maciel currently resides in Donner and has been there since its inception as an earned living unit in 2023. He said it’s the first and only time he’s had a cell to himself in more than eight years of incarceration.

“Donner feels like I’m on parole,” said Maciel. “It’s the closest thing to almost feeling free in prison because we’re not feeling pressure from correctional officers or anything like that. It’s super important, because now I’m able to just concentrate on myself.”

Staying in Donner requires remaining disciplinary-free, so Maciel and others in the unit act accordingly.

“I am afraid of the consequences,” he said about potentially getting a write-up and losing his single-cell privileges. “I’m very mindful that I’m following the rules all the time — because I appreciate where I’m at.”

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Joe Garcia is a California Local News fellow.