San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Report details how to transform San Quentin
out Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to transform San Quentin State Prison into a more humane enclave, his advisers say the population of California’s oldest prison should be reduced by 30% or more, guards should be retrained to foster “a more rehabilitative culture” and Death Row should be replaced by “dignified housing.”
“The only way to make the environment more livable and rehabilitative, and to give all who are incarcerated at San Quentin access to its strong programming, is to reduce the population and fund efforts to improve the living conditions of those who are still incarcerated,” Newsom’s Advisory Council on San Quentin said in a report released Friday. “From a humanitarian, public health, and public safety perspective, it is time for change.”
Newsom announced plans in March to convert the 171-year-old North Bay prison from a maximumsecurity lockup to a rehabilitation and education center that would focus on preparing inmates for their return to civilian life. He said it would be modeled on prisons in Norway and other Scandinavian countries, where treatment is less punitive and their conditions are more like those in civilian life.
Little has changed at
the prison so far. Newsom ordered San Quentin’s Death Row dismantled after declaring a moratorium on executions in California during his first months in office in 2019. But the death penalty is still part of California law, approved by the voters, and Newsom has not granted clemency to any of the state’s 652 condemned prisoners, who could face execution once he leaves office.
Overall, California’s prison population, which had risen to 173,000 in the mid-2000s after passage of “three strikes” and other mandatory-sentencing laws, has dropped to 93,000, its lowest in more
than 30 years. The U.S. Supreme Court ordered the state to reduce its prison population in 2011 after findings that overcrowding had led to shoddy health care that violated constitutional standards, and the state then rolled back some of its laws and transferred thousands of inmates from state prisons to county jails.
But the Advisory Council said California still incarcerates 549 people for every 100,000 in its population, compared to 54 per 100,000 in Norway.
“Over the past few decades, with the purported intention of addressing interpersonal harm, California built and litigated our
way into a bloated and punitive prison system that is expensive, ineffective, unhealthy, and that undermines human dignity,” the report said. “Prisons were used as a solely punitive measure and a site for warehousing people.”
In San Quentin, the council said, 5-by-11-foot cells designed to house one inmate now hold two in bunks, and when those cells ran out of space, 200person dormitories were added. The prison, with a designed capacity of 3,084, now holds 3,447 inmates.
“We strongly recommend eliminating mandatory double-celling (unless it meets the personal needs of the individual),” the report said. “This will result in a reduction in population at San Quentin from its current level of over 3,400 to between 2,200 and 2,600.”
Meanwhile, the panel said, training of prison guards “must extend beyond a focus on security and maintaining order to include equal amounts of training in rehabilitation, normalization, behavior change (and) trauma-informed care.”
Newsom has proposed demolishing an old factory at the prison and replacing it with a building that would house classrooms and other educational facilities, at a cost of $360 million. The Advisory Council said the funding should be cut by at least $120 million, which should instead be spent on “other priority capital projects” at San Quentin, such as “store, café, town square, family visitation areas, housing improvements.”
The recommendation drew a limited endorsement from a group called Californians United for a Responsible Budget, which favors substantial cuts in prison spending and closure of more state prisons.
“This key recommendation from the Governor’s own council echoes our long-standing position –– this building is too expensive,” the group’s deputy director, Brian KaFleshing neda, said in a statement. “However, instead of reallocating saved funds to other costly infrastructure, we advocate for a general shift in fiscal priorities towards community-based programs like reentry initiatives.”
The Advisory Council report said prison programs should focus more on education and job training. The report said more teachers and other mentors should be hired, and the prison should also conduct “restorative justice” sessions between inmates and their victims or survivors.
The state should also “consider establishing one or two 200-person re-entry campuses on San Quentin’s property (outside prison walls) with the highest priority given to San Quentin residents,” the council said. Statewide, the report said, California should do more to provide services to prisoners who are re-entering society after serving long sentences.
And whatever transformations the state implements at the prison, the council said, it must make sure that “staff, victims/ survivors and San Quentin residents have a voice and window into the implementation of this project and its impact on public safety.”