San Quentin rehab plan is set up to work

Gov. Gavin Newsom drew headlines with his recent announcement of his plan for a transformation of San Quentin State Prison.

His plan is building on change that is already taking place at the state's oldest prison and the longtime home of death row, on which California's most notorious inmates were kept awaiting their court-ordered execution.

In 2019, Newsom declared a moratorium on executions and many of inmates on San Quentin's death row have already been transferred to high-security prisons across the state.

Today, San Quentin holds about 3,300 inmates, a significant reduction from the days it held more than 5,000 and became the target for court order to eliminate overcrowded conditions.

It also has a history of political attempts to close it, with those arguments based on the prison's antiquated design that requires more correctional officers and the value of the bayfront real estate on which it has stood for 171 years.

But Newsom isn't talking about closing San Quentin, but instead furthering its recent initiatives aimed at rehabilitating the men serving their sentences there and building a new model based on safety and justice.

His plan calls for turning the prison into a rehabilitation center for 2,000 inmates, those serving time for lesser sentences.

In recent years, programs aimed at vocational training and education of San Quentin's inmates, steering them to law-abiding lives upon their release, have been a priority. Many of those programs are supported by community volunteers.

The nonprofit Mount Tamalpais College, the nation's first accredited junior college behind bars, is just one example.

Now Newsom has budgeted $20 million to do even more. His plan includes relocating the remaining 500 death row inmates to other state prisons.

Financial details of his plan have not been released.

The governor is hoping his plan reverses California's record of recidivism, where two-thirds of the men and women released from state prisons return to lives of crime and wind up back behind prison bars.

Newsom says that changing the scenario will make California communities safer and reduce the prison system's population.

The model he envisions for San Quentin, he says, is a way to instill “humanity and some normalcy,” giving them the training and preparation for changing their lives to make better choices than those that might return them to incarceration.

“We want to be the preeminent restorative justice facility in the world — that's the goal,” Newsom said during last week's visit to San Quentin.

These days, the number of men and women in California's 34 prisons is declining. Newsom has even talked about closing some of the prisons.

With longstanding pressure reduced in terms of having to build or expand prisons to hold a burgeoning population, the time is right to look at reforms that could not only reduce recidivism and help turn former convicts into, as Newsom put it, “positive contributory citizens.”

Few would disagree with that objective.

At San Quentin, the foundation is already there to make rehabilitation a reality, to increase the chances that these men who have served their sentences can be given the tools, training and opportunities to turn their lives away from crime.

Any viable reform also has to focus on promoting confidence in the private sector that hiring these men is more promising than problematic.

Newsom now needs to back up his words with details to make this promising reform a reality.