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By Steve Brooks & Olivia Heffernan , Originally Published on Truthout
As droughts, extreme heat, and other climate disasters increasingly plague California, people throughout the state have been subject to water restrictions. For many Californians, this means emergency regulations like limitations on lawn watering. But one group of people has been forced to bear the brunt of the state’s water restrictions: those in prison.
People in California prisons already face an acute vulnerability to extreme heat and cold, wildfires, droughts, and flooding. While steps have been taken in recent years to protect the safety of incarcerated people in California during climate hazards, the lack of state funding, data, and preparation — paired with overincarceration — continue to pose a fatal threat to their health and livelihoods.
And despite this increased vulnerability, incarcerated Californians have been forced for years to heavily limit their water use, including through restricted shower access, limited toilet flushing, and other extreme measures that people living outside prison walls would never be expected to endure.
Punished for Taking a Shower
This climate-related suffering is amplified by overcrowding, a longstanding problem in California prisons. San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, for instance, which opened in 1852 with 68 occupants, grew dangerously overcrowded within six years: By 1858, it housed over 500 people in just 62 cells. San Quentin is now home to almost 4,000 people.
In 2006, California’s prison population hit a peak of 174,000 — 200 percent of the system’s design capacity of 85,000 people — exceeding all other states’ prison populations and prompting Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to declare a state of emergency. That same year, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) was placed under a federal receivership due to the poor quality of medical care revealed in a 2001 class action lawsuit. By 2006, the federal court had taken over management of CDCR’s health care departments due to poor quality of care and rising disease and death rates.
As the state continued to deal with overcrowding and abysmal medical care in its prisons, California experienced a historic drought in 2009, prompting Gov. Schwarzenegger to declare a drought emergency. NBC News reported at that time that California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger encouraged urban water agencies to reduce water use by 20 percent and that the governor added that mandatory conservation was likely if the reduction was insufficient.
Although 80 percent of California’s developed water goes to agriculture, CDCR responded to the emergency by creating a water conservation plan. The department issued an order limiting the number of showers for incarcerated individuals to three per week: Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. Many showers were equipped with shutoff valves controllable by officers who would turn them off after five minutes. Regardless of the weather or the activities a person had done that day (exercising out in the yard, for example), showers could only be taken during the designated times. Only those with certain jobs — such as those who worked in the prison’s kitchen, construction, or maintenance departments — were allowed to shower daily.
Throughout California prisons, outdoor showers were condemned, water hoses in kitchen areas discontinued, and garbage disposal usage ceased. Numerous drinking fountains were turned off, and ice machine access was limited to the minimal amount needed to comply with the “heat plan” for at-risk prisoners. Laundry services were reduced to once a week.
Even before the 2009 drought emergency and subsequent water conservation plan, CDCR had taken steps to limit water use in its facilities. Between 2006 and 2008, CDCR installed over 45,800 “flushometers,” devices that limit the number of times a toilet may be flushed in a designated period. Two flushes every five minutes soon became standard for California’s incarcerated population, who, confined to small, cramped, double-cell housing, were forced to live with the smell of their own waste.
Showers in prisons are often offered after breakfast, a time that conflicts with going to the yard to exercise, leaving people forced to choose between one or the other. If you miss the shower window and try to take one later in the day, an officer will likely issue a rules violation report (RVR), which can impact a parole hearing for people serving life sentences. One incarcerated person, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of reprisal from members of the Board of Parole Hearings, told Truthout that he was denied his parole date for three years and instructed to enroll in a criminal thinking class for taking a shower at the “wrong” time.
Michael Moore, who is also incarcerated at San Quentin, said he received an RVR Counseling Chrono, which is similar to a citation or ticket detailing misbehavior, for showering at the wrong time. Moore said he works out frequently and needs a shower every day. Many incarcerated people report that they find ways to shower outside their allotted shower time, such as standing under dripping water from broken shower heads, or filling up buckets with sink water and taking a bird bath in the shower. These actions, too, are frowned upon by correctional officers, and can result in RVRs.
In one instance, Moore received a report from a correctional officer that read: “On Saturday April 30, 2022 … at approximately 10:15 hours, I announced via public address intercom to the entire unit and gave a direct order: ‘unit lockup, go to the yard, go to your assigned cell, no dayroom and MEDICAL SHOWERS ONLY.’ I repeated this twice to ensure the entire unit understood. Approximately five minutes later, I observed inmate Moore in the shower area disobeying the order that had been given for Unit lockup…”
Moore, who is serving a life sentence, will undoubtedly have to address this issue at future parole hearings.
Yet while CDCR has been quick to limit human water consumption, the department has done little to fix busted water mains, running shower heads, and leaky sinks at dilapidated facilities. And its poor water management does little to help when overcrowding and inadequate health care services coincide to allow disease outbreaks, including norovirus,scabies, flu, and tuberculosis. A Legionnaires’ disease scare took place at San Quentin in 2015 and 2016, and chicken pox has caused issues in various California prisons.
But nothing was more dangerous than when COVID came barreling through prisons and cell doors were slammed shut. COVID exacerbated the preexisting uncleanliness and lack of fresh air flow inside the housing units at San Quentin. Yet prison officials rejected help from the Public Health Department in Marin and ignored the advice of infectious disease experts from the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco. San Quentin did not accept personal protective equipment offers or follow instructions on how to properly keep the premises clean.
Yet even during the spread of sickness and death, the prison remained focused on limiting water usage, forcing people to go days and weeks without showers. The combination of these conditions, water limitations, and COVID resulted in one of the worst epidemiological disasters in prison history: over 2,000 COVID infections and 29 deaths.
Incarcerated people at San Quentin at the time said that correctional staff showed little sympathy, even as people were dying. Many officers repeated the mantra: “If you don’t like what’s happening, you shouldn’t have come to prison.”
Climate Change Demands a New Penal Plan
The United States Supreme Court recognizes an incarcerated person’s right to certain basic human needs, as protected by the Eighth Amendment, which includes access to yard exercise and a shower.
On October 8, 2023, Governor Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 353 into law, ensuring incarcerated people’s constitutional right to shower at least every other day, unless there is a written reason for denial.
“All human beings have a right to ensure good hygiene, regardless of their status in society. It is immoral, inhumane, and cruel to deprive someone of their right to shower,” the bill’s author, then-Assembly Member Reggie-Jones Sawyer, wrote in support of the legislation. “In spite of this, reports from persons housed at CDCR prisons shine a light on the abuses that are being committed against them. AB 353 seeks to rectify one of those by spelling out in law an incarcerated person’s right to shower and uphold proper hygiene.
“Those detained at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) facilities have reported limited access to showers, a basic human right,” said Initiate Justice, a nonprofit prison advocacy group, in a comment on the bill. “As a result, incarcerated individuals can go up to a week without taking a shower, essentially forced to sit in the stench of their body odor and musty clothes. This is not only inhumane but also very unsanitary,” they said.
Los Angeles District Attorney, George Gascon, supported AB 353 as well, asking:
“How we can expect positive outcomes from individuals released from prison if basic human rights and human dignities like showering are not provided while they are incarcerated?”
Enforcement of AB 353 comes on the heels of a new paradigm for incarceration in the state’s prisons. In late 2023, CDCR announced an alleged overhaul of its prison system. Its new so-called “California Model” is loosely based on Scandinavia’s treatment of incarcerated people. This “transformation” should certainly include showers as a basic right, not as a privilege earned through involuntary servitude. Other changes are coming to CDCR as well, including a proposed $360 million dollar rehabilitation building at San Quentin.
But prisons are not in the clear. In his executive order ending some regulations stemming from the state’s drought emergency, Gov. Newsom said that due to climate change, Californians should “continue their ongoing efforts to make conservation a way of life.”
In its Climate Change Adaptation Report, CDCR reports that a “significant number” of its prisons are “located in climate zones that experience extreme heat or cold in summer and winter months and an equally significant number are located in remote locations that may suffer from extreme rain events, wildfires, depletion of local water supplies or similar climate-related concerns.” In response, CDCR has proposed retrofitting and building better prisons. But advocates ask: Why not just close prisons and reduce the population, instead of building resilient buildings where people continue to suffer?
Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a nonprofit community organization, offers a roadmap to closing 10 California prisons by 2025. Gov. Newsom has agreed to close five; so far, the state closed Deuel Vocational Institution in 2021, Susanville California Conservation Center in 2023, and Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in 2024.
In a 2023 report from the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, titled “Hidden Hazards,” UCLA researchers outlined a blueprint that would better ensure a safe environment for incarcerated people. The recommendations include preventing suffering by closing climate-vulnerable prisons, expanding emergency preparedness training for staff and incarcerated people, and installing and maintaining life-saving basics like heating, air conditioning, ventilation, shade, and backup generators within prisons. It also suggests that CDCR create plans for how to respond to emergencies and track the annual number of climate hazards experienced in its facilities.
Yet, the report also emphasizes that decarceration must be a centerpiece of addressing prisons’ climate vulnerability. It recommends the state reduce the size of the overall incarcerated population by 50 percent or 50,000, with an emphasis on the elderly and those who are most vulnerable. Furthermore, it suggests CDCR create plans to rapidly release people during emergencies.
This world is not getting any safer. Climate change is real, and so are the catastrophes that result from it. Drought conditions in California are a warning of what is possible. Stripping people — especially the most vulnerable populations behind bars — of their human right to water is never the answer. We shouldn’t wait for another disaster to fix what needs to be fixed today. Conservation is necessary, but placing the burden on dangerous and disease-ridden overcrowded prisons is cruel and unfeasible.
Steve Brooks is an award-winning journalist with bylines in TIME, Prism, Bay City News Foundation’s Local News Matters, Sports Illustrated, and more. He is the former editor-in-chief of San Quentin News and a co-founder of The People in Blue, a group of incarcerated people who helped create California Governor Gavin Newsom’s Reimagine San Quentin report.
Olivia Heffernan is a writer, editor, and award winning filmmaker. Her work explores the intersection of race, labor, and incarceration. She has written for Jacobin, The Baffler, and The Nation, among many other publications.
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