Your information is incorrect. Some inmates do interact with other inmates. The officials decide which ones are compatible.
"Many condemned men have stopped breathing and disappeared with scarcely a ripple in the media pool.
A whistle will pierce through a cell block. "We've got a hanger," booms over the housing unit's loudspeakers. Guards spike open a cell door, handcuff a dead-body's hands before they cut the hangman noose. Tossing the corpse into a bright orange stretcher, the badges haul the remains of the suicide away. The property officer boxes up the deceased man's belongings, trustees hose out the cell, another condemned man is shoved inside the four-by-ten foot box, and the relentless, mind-numbing daily routine of Death Row grinds on and on and on.
Often it's fair easy to see the mental deterioration, suicide seems inevitable, and it's almost a relief when the condemned man ends his misery-filled existence.
A friend of mine, Ron Fuller, piled all his belongings onto his steel bunk and set them on fire. From six cells away, I could feel the heat radiating on my mind when I stuck my mirror outside my cell bars to see what the commotion was about. Crackling flames roared out of Ron's cell reaching up and licking the tier of cells above us.
Whistles blowing, heavy boots pounding, the guards arrived and brought the blaze under control. Handcuffing Ron, the uniforms yoked him out of his cell. Marching past my cell with a guard on each arm, Ron's unfocused eyes were spinning wildly, the hair on his chest and arms had been singed away, and I could smell charred flesh.
After treating his burns, Ron was turned over to the California Department of Corrections' psychologists who opined he was faking suicide. You see, the State of California isn't allowed to execute anyone who's insane -- it's the law. So the psyches employed by the State of California asserted Ron was playing insane in order to fend off the gas chamber.
Prison officials charged Ron a couple of hundred dollars for the cell's fire damage, tossed him inside anther four-by-ten-foot box and pretty much ignored him. Finally, he made a noose, tied it to his bars, stuck his head inside the loop, pulled it tight and quietly died."