FRONTERA, Calif., Apr. 19 — A miniature “death row” with three tiny green cells is being prepared at the California Institution for Women. Charles Manson’s three women followers, condemned along with him to die for the Sharon Tate murders, will be housed there awaiting appeals.

With years of litigation ahead, officials are planning for the three to spend a long time in the rooms, each the size of a bathroom — 7 1/2 feet by nine feet. They will have small black-and-white televisions for company.

“The units are small and restrictive,” says Iverne Carter, superintendent. “It is a very narrow horizon.”

Mrs. Carter, an energetic 67-year-old grandmother, supervised hasty renovation of a prison wing after jurors returned death verdicts on March 29 against Manson, 36; Patricia Krenwinkel, 23; Leslie Van Houten, 21, and Susan Atkins 22. All were convicted in the 1969 slayings of the actress and six others. Manson ultimately will go to San Quentin prison’s death row.

The group is scheduled to be formally sentenced today, and the women’s transfer to Frontera is expected within 10 days.

The death penalty is rare for women — only four have been executed in California since 1893 — and the modern prison was designed with only one death penalty cell. That cell has been occupied for more than a year by Jean Oliver Carver, 39, convicted of beating a woman evangelist to death with a rock during a robbery.

The sprawling complex of one-story red brick buildings was built in 1952 amid pasturelands in this rural community 50 miles east of Los Angeles. It is California’s only women’s prison.

Mrs. Carter asked the state for a new building when the women were sentenced, but was refused. She was troubled by the grimness of the only quarters available — a wing of the admissions center which will be sealed off from the rest of the building by twin heavy steel doors.

“I think it’s livable,” says Mrs. Carter, “but it’s not as secure for the staff or against escape as I would have liked.”

A crew of workers from a nearby men’s prison is installing stronger bars on windows and doors and mesh between the bars to prevent the women from reaching through. They also are raising a high chain link fence topped by barbed wire outside the death row building and putting in heavier electronically controlled doors and new entrances.

The building has six cells on two sides of a corridor. Three will be used for staff or utility rooms.
Miss Krenwinkel, Miss Van Houten and Miss Atkins will live in side-by-side cells, unable to see each other unless, with good behavior, they are allowed a stroll down the corridor.

“Everything will depend on their behavior,” says Mrs. Carter. If they adjust well, they’ll be allowed to go a few steps outside into a caged exercise yard, about 100 feet long. The area is mostly concrete, but workers are seeding a tiny patch of grass where “they can sit and meditate or walk around.”‘

But most of their time will be spent in the cells with pale green brick walls and a gray concrete floor. Each cell has a mattress on a frame, a chair and writing table, a toilet and a sink. Over the sink is a chrome disk which substitutes as a mirror, giving a girl a distorted vision of her own face.

A large window in each cell lets in light, and through bars the women will see part of the grassy prison “campus” where women under medium or minimum security stroll in sports clothes or brightly colored prison shift dresses.

Mrs. Carter feels the women will have a regimented pattern of life geared to the possibility they won’t be executed.

“We have to keep them well and alive since things could change in regard to their sentences, and they may someday be useful to society,” says Mrs. Carter. “This is the kind of case we anticipate will be in litigation a long time.”

Even if the gas chamber lies ahead, she says, “the only way to maintain their sanity is to keep their minds active and interested.” Diversions are already planned.

“These are intelligent young women,” says Mrs. Carter. “We’ll try to get them interested in hobbies.”

They will have books, newspapers and magazines. But the chief diversion will be television which “they can watch all night long if they want.”

A special staff of live watchwomen, ages 21 to 35, will guard them in shifts.