"San Quentin has roughly six hundred prisoners on death row," she told Carlo. "More than anywhere in America. Rennell's in East Block, where most of them are—five rows of cages stacked in tiers. Each cell is six feet by six, with a bunk, a stainless steel toilet and sink, a maximum of six cubic feet for possessions, one small shelf, and maybe a TV with headphones to cut down the noise.
"There's a lot of shouting—conversations about sports, or people calling out chess moves, or just screaming for no reason. East Block's also where they put prisoners with things like psychosis, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. Which makes it worse for Rennell—most of the death row population is sort of dulled down, just resigned. But the mentals are loud—"
"Can Rennell see anyone?" Carlo interjected.
"Only the guards. The walls to each side are concrete—you can only look out the front, and that has bars which are crosshatched to keep the prisoners from pelting guards with urine or feces. They can peer in at you, of course—whether you're sitting on the toilet or just lying on your bunk. Otherwise there's just noise bouncing off concrete and metal."
"Does Rennell get out for meals?"
Terri shook her head. "They prepare the food in the main kitchen. Then guards push it over on carts, raise it on a mini-elevator to the tier—Rennell's on the fourth tier up—and slide it through a food slot built into the bars. The hot breakfast comes with a box lunch for later, a sandwich with peanut butter or mystery meat and maybe some fruit and a couple of cookies. Then there's another hot meal for dinner. After a time, the guards pick up the trays." Glancing at her watch, Terri stamped down on the gas pedal. "From the standpoint of the prison administration, cell feedings take up a lot of time and labor. But letting this crowd eat together would be worse. Especially with all the crazies."
Carlo had never thought to visualize Rennell Price's day. Now he imagined himself stuck in a cage amidst five tiers of cages housing people he could only hear; the endless, dissociated sameness of waiting for trays to materialize through a slot, bringing much the same meals you'd had the day before. "What about showers?" he asked.
"Showers you get three times a week. But the showers are converted cells, which never seem to work that well. Best not to expect warm water." Squinting, Terri took her sunglasses off the dashboard and slid them on. "Or to smell very good. That's one of the prices of exercising daily."
"Where do they do that?"
Terri jerked down the sun visor. "Exercise? There are six exercise yards, each with a basketball hoop and a toilet, each surrounded by concrete walls and partially covered with a metal roof in case it's raining out. On a catwalk above the roof are guards with rifles—to quell riots or, in theory, to keep some prisoners from getting killed by others. San Quentin's a dangerous place—a lot of prisoners refuse to exercise for fear of getting killed by other inmates, or maybe just because the yards are crowded and there's nothing much to do . . ."
"Can't they segregate the worst ones?"
"Actually, they try." Turning on the right blinker, Terri glanced over her shoulder and changed lanes, exiting the highway at the sign for San Quentin State Prison. "They divide prisoners into categories," she continued. "Grade A's, the supposedly well-behaved ones, can exercise together up to five hours a day. Grade B's—psychotics and gang members and the obviously violent—don't get out much at all. And then there are the 'walk-alones,' like Rennell and Payton.
"Walk-alone is the name for at-risk inmates: snitches, or prisoners whose crimes are so low status that other prisoners think they don't deserve to live." Terri smiled faintly. "I guess they don't see the irony."
"Where do Rennell and Payton fit in?"
"Child sex criminals. From top to bottom, the hierarchy goes from rage killings—some guy catches his girlfriend with someone else—to someone convicted of killing a child in the course of sex. That's the Price brothers.
"In a way, they're lucky. Snitches can't go in the yard. But sex offenders get to exercise with their own kind, several hours a day." Turning down a two-lane road toward the prison, Terri added softly, "Rennell gets to see his older brother almost every day. So they get to go through life together, just like before."
* * *
San Quentin sprawled across an isolated finger of land. Parking in the lot below the guardhouse, Terri and Carlo got out.
She had schooled him in the rules. They both wore gray suits to differentiate themselves from the prison population—blue or denim was forbidden. They locked all their possessions in the Jeep except for a notepad, pen, their drivers' licenses, Terri's State Bar ID, and the clear plastic bag filled with quarters, which—on Terri's instructions—Carlo carried so that they could get Rennell food from the vending machine. Then they headed for the guardhouse which screened all visiting lawyers.
"We're the privileged visitors," Terri remarked. "Nonlawyer visits are a bitch."
"How so?"
"People like Rennell's grandmother can only call a few hours every week to schedule visits. And the phones are so busy you have to keep hitting the rep dial and hope that you'll get through.
"Often, you won't. That means no visit. If you get lucky, then you go to the general visiting area and sit in a cage with your prisoner, surrounded by more cages holding other prisoners and their visitors. It's been like that ever since members of a rival gang got into a fight—what had been an open room became a zoo." Terri opened the door to the guardhouse, a one-story wooden structure that resembled a cheap trailer. "To the authorities, visitation is just another problem they'd sooner be without. So they make it as hard as possible for someone like Eula Price to even schedule a visit. But then running death row's no picnic, I suppose."
At the desk inside, a somewhat chatty guard—happy to be working outside the prison walls, Carlo assumed—waited while they filled out a visitor form before shooing them through security. Carlo stripped off his belt and shoes and watch and passed through a metal detector; retrieving them, he emerged from the building with Terri to find himself inside San Quentin State Prison.
To his right were mock Tudor homes, housing for prison staff; ahead, looming above the sprawling stucco prison, was a tower manned by guards with rifles. To the left was death row, next to a ventilator shaft jutting from the prison's roof.
Terri followed his gaze. "The gas chamber," she told him. "It's still available for occupancy. But lethal injection's now the death of choice."
"Who decides?"
"Rennell." Her tone was clipped. "A bullet in the brain seems more humane than either. But that's too up close and personal."
They passed through a second security station with a guardhouse and metal detector. Beyond that a neatly tended square of grass surrounded a marker engraved with the names of murdered prison guards. "You mentioned gangs?" Carlo said. "You'd think they'd keep a pretty tight lid on this place."
"They do. But somehow the folks inside come up with knives and makeshift weapons. And there's still an underground economy: people making 'pruno'—alcohol fermented from fruit—or getting drugs, maybe through employees gone bad. There's everything from weed to crack and black tar heroin." Stopping at an iron gate, the entry to death row, Terri added, "As for gangs, it's a veritable United Nations. You've got the Bloods, the Crips, the Skinheads, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Mexican Mafia, and the North and South Mexicans. There's even alliances: at the moment, the North Mexicans and the Bloods are united against the South Mexicans and, of all people, the Aryans. Go figure. I guess it's a case of self-protection over principle."
"What about our guys?"
"They're just survivors." She paused. "I've never met Payton. But I hear he's spent the last fifteen years becoming a real badass—abs of steel, two hundred push-ups at a crack. He's made himself mean enough to live, and maybe for Rennell to live, too."