The Cost of Doing Nothing: Revisiting California’s death row

Since restoring the death penalty in 1978, California has condemned more than 900 individuals, yet executed just 13. The hundreds who remain are housed at San Quentin State Prison in a highly restricted cell block plagued by suicides, drugs, mental illness, neglect and idleness. This essay offers a glimpse at the lives, despair and deaths of condemned killers who wait decades for executions that never come. It questions the moral cost of such limbo.