Visualize This

By Michael A. Kroll

Without apparent shame, governments from Nazi Germany to the Khmer Rouge kept meticulous and clinically described records of their official killing apparatus. So, I should not have been shocked to find the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, promoting our own citizen killing machine, there for the world to see, both as it is and as it is hoped to be.

I discovered the animated tour (called a “Visualization) quite by accident. I was trying to find information on whether the swine flu has closed the prisons to visitors or not (it has), when I inadvertently discovered the link, which some enterprising young techno has uploaded to YouTube.

The tour is divided into two parts, the first of which I call “That Frighteningly Familiar Sight,” since it reveals from above the death chamber at San Quentin and its surrounding environment, including the “Viewing Area” in which I stood, 17 years ago, and watched, traumatized, as The People of California (including me) subjected my friend Robert Harris to a lethal dose of cyanide gas, causing him to gasp for air during the sixteen minutes it took to kill him.

In the animation, you are looking down on the entire contraption as distinct areas are serially highlighted and their dimensions given. The tour begins in that same room where I witnessed my friend’s killing, a horror I described in a cover story for The Nation magazine in July, 1992. The Viewing Area is 510 sq. ft.

Next, you see the “Prep/Control” room, whose dimensions are 12’x15’. This is where the Execution Team meets, discusses the upcoming procedure, doles out tasks and monitors the entire process.

From the “Prep/Control” room, we look down on the room they now call the “Injection Room” — though it’s the same chamber in which my friend gasped and choked like a fish out of water for that quarter of an hour. The two steel chairs that once occupied it have been replaced by a sterile-looking gurney. If it were not housed in the old, green octagonal gas chamber (“7.5’ Diameter, 43 sq. ft.”), it could pass as the latest in ICU-chic.

Next door to the “Injection Room” is the “Mixing Room” (70 sq. ft.). During the days of lethal gas (1941-1999), this is where the Execution Team mixed the sulfuric acid with distilled water and sent it down a tube to fill a well beneath the condemned’s chair, just before the cyanide pellets tied beneath it were lowered into the mixture to release their deadly fumes. Since lethal injection (“Procedure 770”) replaced lethal gas (“Procedure 769”) as California’s preferred method of killing, this room is now where the three-part cocktail is mixed. (Currently, our killing machine is out of commission, first to give the Department time to meet its administrative requirements of posting the new procedures, giving public notice, holding hearings, etc., after which a federal lawsuit waits in abeyance to determine whether what is put in place [“Procedure 771”] meets the standards of the 8th Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.)

The “Holding Cells” are described next. There are two of them, each 8’x5’ for those occasions when efficiency requires us to take the lives of two people on the same day. In the era of the gas chamber, we could do both at the same time (and we carried out those double headers 22 times), but with a single gurney in the chamber, such procedures will now have to be done one after the other.

Finally, we come to the “Watch Officer” room. From here, the lucky man or woman who gets this assignment — and the extra pay that comes with it — watches…

Now, the video switches to the jaw-dropping visualization of the proposed new death chamber, a state-of-the art (if art it is) killing contraption.

We begin with the “Press Viewing Area”, which, at 533 square feet, is by far the largest room in the proposed plant. Back in 1992 when I stood on the riser provided for the condemned’s family, we were all in the same room together: the media, the victims’ families, the official visitors (designated by the governor), the Warden and his staff. Now, each has its own private and personal viewing arena.

The “Family Viewing Area” (that would be the family of the condemned) is now separate from the “Victim Viewing Area” — separate but equal… in area: 14’x9’.

The “Injection Room” is wide enough for the doctors and nurses — oops! I mean the guards — to walk around without tripping over each other as they poke needles into the condemned’s arms or legs trying to find a usable vein. Its dimensions are given as 23’x10’, less than half the area devoted to the media who will monitor the condemned’s every last movement, and give us a minute-by-minute playback the next day.

The new “Control Room” is 16’x10’ (maintaining control of the process, making sure every cog is oiled and working smoothly, is a critical part of this official homicide). Every eventuality is discussed, and contingency plans developed in the “Staff Staging Area” (120 sq. ft.).

Finally, the visualization highlights the tiny room devoted to “Spiritual Needs.” At 35 square feet, it is less than a third the size of the next smallest compartment. At 7’x5’, it occupies a space representing 2% of the total, which probably accurately reflects the degree to which spirituality has any influence on capital punishment (condemned by virtually every major religion in the world).

It’s all there, proudly laid out in the Department’s promotional video and available to all through YouTube Take a look. While you try to figure out if you’ll have a job next month, or where your next mortgage or rent payment is coming from, you, too, can take pride in the hundreds of millions of dollars of your taxes that we spend to carry out the task of putting human beings to death in our names.

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