'Man Down!': Inside the Deadly COVID-19 Outbreak at San Quentin

The frantic cries rang out across the cellblock: “Man down! Man down! Man down!”

At California’s San Quentin State Prison, that’s the call prisoners use to alert staff about a life-or-death emergency. In June and July, with the coronavirus tearing through the prison, it became a grimly familiar chorus. Each incident would trigger alarm bells and corrections officers rushing in to remove critically ill men from their cells.

Nowhere was the outbreak worse than San Quentin’s death row, home to more than 700 condemned men, more than any prison in...