Facing Prison-Conditions Court Challenge, South Carolina Moves Its Death Row to a New Facility

Amidst an ongo­ing law­suit chal­leng­ing the con­sti­tu­tion­al­i­ty of South Carolina​’s death-row con­di­tions, the state has moved its death-row pris­on­ers to a dif­fer­ent prison. On July 11, 2019, the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDOC) moved the state’s 38 death-row pris­on­ers from Kirkland Correctional Institution to the near­by Broad River Correctional Institution (pic­tured), into a facil­i­ty that had orig­i­nal­ly been built to house death-row pris­on­ers in 1988. In a press release, SCDOC said the move ​“will address some of the con­cerns raised in a recent law­suit filed on behalf of the Death Row inmates.” 

One of the major issues raised in the prison-con­di­tions law­suit was the unnec­es­sary harsh­ness of the near-con­stant soli­tary con­fine­ment to which death-row pris­on­ers were sub­ject­ed. Those on death row were kept in small, win­dow­less cells about the size of a park­ing space as much as 23 hours a day. The law­suit charged that South Carolina’s death-row pris­on­ers ​“are sub­ject­ed to indef­i­nite extreme iso­la­tion, devoid of men­tal stim­u­la­tion, and have only spo­radic human inter­ac­tion.” At the new loca­tion, SCDOC said, pris­on­ers will be giv­en more oppor­tu­ni­ties to inter­act with one anoth­er, but will still be sep­a­rat­ed from the gen­er­al prison population. 

Corrections direc­tor Bryan Stirling said that state prison offi­cials had vis­it­ed death rows in North Carolina and Virginia to learn about con­di­tions and prac­tices in oth­er states. Virginia recent­ly improved its death-row con­di­tions in response to a legal chal­lenge sim­i­lar to the one pend­ing in South Carolina. A fed­er­al appeals court rul­ing in May 2019 by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit barred Virginia from return­ing to its ear­li­er prac­tice of keep­ing pris­on­ers iso­lat­ed 23 hours a day. The court — whose juris­dic­tion also includes South Carolina — cit­ed ​“empir­i­cal evi­dence … that soli­tary con­fine­ment pos­es an objec­tive risk of seri­ous psy­cho­log­i­cal and emo­tion­al harm to inmates, and there­fore can vio­late the Eighth Amendment.” 

The new pol­i­cy in South Carolina will allow death-row pris­on­ers to hold jobs with­in their prison unit, includ­ing ​“serv­ing meals, clean­ing the com­mon areas, laun­dry or assist­ing fel­low inmates with dis­abil­i­ties.” They will also be allowed to par­tic­i­pate in com­mu­nal wor­ship ser­vices. Bob McAlister, a vol­un­teer prison min­is­ter, said ​“it was impos­si­ble to have any kind of con­ver­sa­tion” in the old facil­i­ty, because he could only talk to pris­on­ers through a slot in their door. ​“There was no mean­ing­ful way to estab­lish rela­tion­ships,” he said. ​“The only way I could talk to them was to lit­er­al­ly shout. … It does no one any good to have complete isolation.”