On October 1, between four and eight women staged a hunger strike—inmate Jody Bedell fasted for 24 days before ending the strike. Both the sit-down protest and hunger strike were meant to call attention to overcrowding, poor medical care, inadequate education programs and the shortage of showers and laundry machines. At the time, the prison was built for 80 women but was housing over 140 women and had only one shower for every 43 inmates. The women who participated in the hunger strike were ordered to spend a year in a segregation unit and were fined $214. In May 2020, ODOC announced that the state will close its death row. On December 13, 2022, Governor Kate Brown commuted the death sentences of everyone on Oregon's death row to life without parole. She also instructed the Department of Corrections to dismantle the state's death chamber. Facility and programs The prison is located on of land in the southeast of Salem, Oregon. The facility itself consists of , surrounded by a wall which is patrolled by armed correctional officers. Most housing in the penitentiary is in large cell blocks with most inmates housed in single man cells that have been converted to double man cells to increase capacity. The penitentiary also has a full service infirmary. Intensive Management Unit Oregon State Penitentiary was the site of Oregon's first supermax unit, the "Intensive Management Unit" (IMU), constructed in 1991. The 196-bed self-contained Intensive Management Unit provides housing and control for male inmates who disrupt or pose a substantial threat to the general population in all department facilities. In 2006, this facility held 147 people (out of a total of 784 across Oregon) in solitary confinement. Conditions in the IMU were the object of public criticism, triggered particularly by multiple suicide of mentally ill prisoners. Former warden Brian Belleque also expressed doubts about the possibility of rehabilitation in the IMU, saying: "We realize that 95 to 98 percent of these inmates here are going to be your neighbor in the community. They are going to get out." Prisoners in the OSP IMU were moved in 2009 to Snake River Correctional Institution in Ontario, Oregon. In 2010, ODOC began to convert the IMU into a psychiatric facility, which will serve mentally ill prisoners from across Oregon. Some advocates for the mentally ill have argued that the IMU facility is not suitable for treating the mentally