From the Death Penalty Information Center:

Several months after Arizona settled a lawsuit over the conditions of confinement on the state’s death row, the state has ended the practice of automatically housing condemned prisoners in solitary confinement, and prisoners and prison officials alike are praising the changes.

Carson McWilliams (pictured right), Division Director for Offender Operations in the Arizona Department of Corrections (ADC), told the Arizona Republic that the new incarceration conditions provide an “atmosphere where [prisoners] can socialize,” resulting in “reduce[d] anxiety” that, in turn, “adds to safety control” of the prison. And, prison officials say, it has reduced institutional costs.

Prior to the lawsuit, death row had meant 23-hour-per-day confinement in a concrete cell the size of a parking space, shuttered by a steel door with a perforated slot through which the prisoners would receive their meals, and with a bench bed and a sink attached to an uncovered toilet. Prisoners had no contact visits with families or lawyers, were handcuffed behind the back and subjected to body-cavity searches whenever they left their cells, and were restricted to showering or exercising three times a week. They also were denied prison jobs and educational opportunities. About the solitary conditions, McWilliams remarked, “The more you’re restricted inside a cell, the more likely you are to have depression, to have anxiety, to have other types of mental problems that could lead to some type of problem inside the system, whether its self harm, or suicide, or aggression towards a staff member or towards another inmate.”

One death-row prisoner who was interviewed by the paper said, “It’s hard to explain the deprivation. . . . It weighs on your mind.” McWilliams said it now requires fewer officers to manage death row because officers no longer have to deliver individual meals or individually escort each of the 120 prisoners. Kevin Curran, who has been a prison warden at various facilities run by the ADC, said that he “feels safer among the death-row men than among the career criminals and gangsters in the general population.” Under the new conditions, prisoners are able to socialize with each other in activities such as playing basketball, volleyball, or board games, and can eat meals together. One ADC corrections officer told the Arizona Republic that he was “apprehensive” at first about the changes, but the transition has been “very good” with only a “few minor incidents,” which were “a lot less” than he expected.

(M. Kiefer, Arizona death row comes out of solitary, giving convicts more human contact, socialization, Arizona Republic, Dec. 19, 2017.)

On Sunday, November 29, CBS’s 60 Minutes will air a segment on Arizona’s 2-hour botched execution of Joseph Wood. As described by 60 Minutes, Wood’s “execution with a new cocktail of drugs was supposed to take 10 minutes. It took almost two hours, the longest execution in U.S. history.”

On July 23, 2014, Arizona gave Wood 15 consecutive doses of midazolam and hydromorphone, the same drug combination that had been used in the botched execution of Dennis McGuire in Ohio six months earlier. Witnesses to Wood’s execution reported that he gasped and snorted more than 600 times during the 2-hour procedure. Prison officials had estimated that the drugs would take about 10 minutes to kill Wood. Prior to the execution, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit had ordered the state to release information about the source of the drugs and the training of those who would carry it out, but the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the decision and allowed the execution to proceed under a veil of secrecy. Dale Baich, one of Wood’s attorneys, said, “I’ve witnessed a number of executions before and I’ve never seen anything like this. Nor has an execution that I observed taken this long.”

60 Minutes airs at 7:30 pm Eastern, 6:00 pm MST, 7:00 pm Pacific on CBS.