in summary
San Quentin was home to California’s death row for decades. Now Governor Newsom wants the San Francisco Bay Area Prison to focus on rehabilitation and helping inmates re-enter society.
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California’s best-known prison is being reorganized into a rehabilitation center under a plan the governor announced Friday — a move hailed as revolutionary by some prison reform advocates but derided by prison abolitionists as mere window dressing, rather than the more dramatic changes the you want to.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said the state will spend $20 million to begin restructuring San Quentin State Prison from a facility housing 3,300 inmates in a high-security San Francisco Bay Area location to a “center for innovation focused on… Education, rehabilitation and breaking the cycle of crime.”
What that will look like in the end remains unclear for the time being. The new facility will be designed by an advisory committee made up of crime victims, ex-prisoners and academics, according to Newsom’s office. The democratically controlled legislature must also approve funding for the rehabilitation plan.
“This is certainly new and bold and ambitious, and I’m pleased to see it as a step in the right direction,” said Sharon Dolovich, UCLA law professor and director of the Prison Law and Policy Program.
“Sometimes it slips between cup and lip, so who knows how it will turn out. But the idea is right.”
Newsom’s office has not provided a final cost estimate for the facility’s restructuring. Since taking office in 2019, he has marked four other state prisons for closure, a trend made possible by the declining inmate population at state prisons in California.
He said the increased emphasis on rehabilitation would better prepare inmates to rejoin their communities.
“We are here to do more and get better, to reconcile and to face the hard realities. We are as stupid as we want to be,” he said in a statement in prison. “Two-thirds of the people who get out of prison every year within three years violate a parole order or commit some other damned crime. Where’s the security in that?”
A Newsom spokesman said he does not expect to lay off prison staff as part of the change.
San Quentin is known as the seat of California’s death row, although the state has not executed an inmate since 2006. Newsom declared a moratorium on executions in 2019. In 2022, he announced a plan to disband death row and send convicted inmates to other locations.
The new plan would complete the closure of death row and shut down a prison industry agency camp. The facility would be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.
Some of the larger questions about the reorganization will remain unanswered until the prison’s advisory committee makes a decision, including which inmates will be eligible for the rehabilitation center.
The new facility will also offer job training, according to the governor’s office, although the advisory committee must decide which jobs inmates will be trained for. In prisons in other states where job training is a priority, jobs include plumbing and long-distance transportation.
The plan for the new facility is modeled after prisons in Scandinavian countries, including Norway, which significantly improved its recidivism rate from 60-70% in the 1980s to around 20% today when it began allowing more freedom for prisoners and its prisons to focus on rehab.
In these prisons, inmates can wear their own clothes, cook their own food, and move relatively freely within the prison walls. This model has found a foothold in states as diverse as deep blue Connecticut and deep red North Dakota.
Conditions in San Quentin
As early as 1983, San Quentin was a symbol of California’s inability to safely house its inmates. A federal Justice Department report earlier this year pointed to overcrowded conditions, filthy facilities and “serious management problems.”
More than 20 years later, San Quentin prisoners were among those who filed a lawsuit against the California prison system, claiming the medical care they received was inadequate. As part of that lawsuit, a judge found that up to 10 deaths in San Quentin were due to preventable causes.
More recently, at least seven San Quentin inmates went on a hunger strike to protest what they say are grim conditions during a massive COVID-19 outbreak and quarantine at the facility in 2021.
Gangs could operate in San Quentin as they did in most California prisons. Even at its highest security unit, the Safe Housing Unit, which keeps particularly dangerous or influential inmates in solitary confinement for up to an hour or two a day, a former member of a California prison gang has told CalMatters he’s able to outrun a crew of Mexican Mafia gang members from the unit.
The prison, California’s oldest, also has a long list of maintenance needs that totaled more than $1.6 billion in 2021. A report from the Legislative Analyst’s Office last month showed the state has the capacity to close up to nine prisons and eight yards by 2027 as California’s inmate population continues to shrink, and recommended closing the prisons with the greatest maintenance needs.
A model for rehabilitation in California
But San Quentin is also a hub of opportunity for inmates, with an award-winning prison newspaper, the inmate-hosted podcast Ear Hustle, and a college program that allows inmates to earn an associate’s degree in general science after completing 20 classes.
Turning the few things that work at San Quentin on its head would be one of the downsides to restructuring the prison, said Brian Kaneda, associate director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, which has a list of 10 prisons, the Newsom scheduled to close by 2027.
“One reason San Quentin isn’t on our list for closures is that it has good programming,” Kaneda said. “Well, there’s no such thing as a bad prison to close, we’d love for San Quentin to close, but what’s happening with the programming there?”
The broader plan, Kaneda said, set off “a major alarm bell” for prison abolitionists.
“The last thing California needs is a new incarceration philosophy spearheaded by (the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation) who have proven poor stewards of public trust,” Kaneda said.
The Assembly’s Republican caucus did not immediately respond to messages from CalMatters seeking comment.
A bill passed by lawmakers last year would have created a similar pilot program on other prison campuses. Newsom vetoed that bill, blaming the cost.
The bill’s author, Assemblyman Carlos Villapuda, a Stockton Democrat, said he traveled to Norway with CDCR officials this year to better understand how their prisons work. Villapudua’s proposal focused on trucking, an industry in his district that he said needed fresh blood.
The proposal he devised would have allowed people incarcerated to obtain their commercial driver’s license while still in prison.
“So before you’re released, you’re state-certified,” Villapudua said. “This will be the answer to many of our prayers.”
Learn about the lawmakers featured in this story
State Assembly, District 13 (Stockton)
As he chose 2021-2022
liberal
Conservative
District 13 demographics
voter registration
To the
50%
GOP
21%
No party
22%
campaign posts
asm. At least Carlos Villapudua got it
$26,800
of the Agriculture
sector since he was elected to the legislature. That represents
17%
all of his campaign contributions.
