This is the Guardian.

Today, why is California dismantling its death row?

What kind of energy could we exercise in order to achieve better progress?

FINRO.

I'd love you to join me in the green room. Find us wherever you got this podcast. Just search the green room by Deloitte.

Before we start, I want to let you know that in this episode there is a description of an execution. So please take care when you're listening.

This is Global Telling. You have a prepaid call from the Jarvis Masters.

And in May, the California State Prison sent Quentin to accept his call, same or dialed five now.

San Quentin is the oldest prison in California. It was first built in 1852. It's just north of San Francisco and it's basically on the edge of a beach.

Sam Levin's a correspondent for the Guardian US and he spent the past few months talking to five people who were in prison on a death sentence.

When you enter, it's this really intense prison complex where there are more than 4,000 people who are locked up in these very, very overcrowded facilities, these very cinematic traditional looking cells.

Death row is yourselves about 4 to 4,5 feet wide, 8 feet high and 9 to 13 feet deep. And you know, you're not moving for hours in a day.

Like you only got three hours to move around unless you're just walking back and forth in that tiny cell.

Though hundreds of people in San Quentin are condemned to death, there hasn't been an execution in California for nearly 20 years.

You're just stuck in one spot for years and years and decades. So it's just a lack of contact with people on the outside.

For people on death row, living in this state of limbo is distressing.

This place is built for nothing but destroying a world card. Once they do that, they have you and your body. Your base will bang dead.

Now, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, has pledged to end the use of the death penalty in the state.

It's not the question of the death penalty of whether or not people deserve to die for their heinous acts.

The question really is, do we have the right to kill?

Four years ago, Newsom signed an official moratorium on all executions. And since then, he's started the process of dismantling San Quentin's death row, transferring its inmates out and transforming the prison into a so-called Norwegian-style rehabilitation center.

We want to be the preeminent restorative justice facility in the world. That's the goal. San Quentin is iconic. San Quentin is known worldwide. If San Quentin can do it, it can be done anywhere else.

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