How Gavin Newsom plans to transform California’s infamous San Quentin State Prison

California’s oldest and infamous correctional facility, San Quentin State Prison, is headed for a major transformation as Gov. Gavin Newsom advances his efforts to remake the state’s penal system.

Newsom on Friday announced that by 2025, the 171-year-old penitentiary would be converted from a maximum-security prison into a rehabilitation and education facility within the prison system.

San Quentin, which houses about 3,900 inmates and has been home to the nation’s largest death row, would become the largest facility of its kind in the nation, according to the governor.

“We hope this will be a model for the nation, a model for the world,” Newsom said Friday at a press conference from the Marin County prison grounds. “This is about stretching people’s minds about what we’re capable of doing and reducing recidivism in the state.”

Under the governor’s proposal, the facility will immediately be renamed “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.” An advisory group of rehabilitation and public safety experts will spend the next 12-18 months crafting a plan to incorporate progressive incarceration models from countries like Norway. The 546 inmates at San Quentin who have been sentenced to death will be transferred to other prisons across the state, Newsom said.

The 2023-24 budget proposal released by the governor in January allocates $20 million to commence the project. The legislature still needs to formally approve that funding.

More programming coming to California’s San Quentin

Newsom said Friday that the effort would lead to 10 times the amount of programming currently offered at the facility, including converting an underutilized 81,000-square-foot building on the prison grounds.

But for some advocates and inmates like Steve Brooks, programming wasn’t a concern.

Brooks, a reporter for the prison’s newspaper, noted Friday that the facility was already considered “the epicenter of rehabilitation in California.” He said inmates wanted to know how the transformation would address the facility’s “overcrowding” and living conditions.

Although Newsom did not say how the facility’s transformation would address those concerns, legislators, correctional officials and justice reform advocates cheered the governor’s actions.

Ron Broomfield, former San Quentin warden who has been tapped to lead the conversion, said the governor’s plan would bring more resources, programming space and support to the facility.

“Together we can — and we will — create a community where staff, volunteers and our incarcerated population work hand-in-hand to change the way we incarcerate people in California,” Broomfield said Friday.

Philip Melendez, programming director at Smart Justice California and a former San Quentin inmate, said he was confident that the impending transformation of San Quentin would eventually be replicated across the state and nation.

“I commend Governor Newsom for recognizing the humanity of people living inside California’s prisons and for his commitment to healing, accountability, rehabilitation and community safety,” he said.

Incorporating Norwegian methods at San Quentin State Prison

The reimagining of the facility marks the latest in a series of steps by the governor to shift California’s incarceration system away from punishment and toward rehabilitation — one of his original campaign promises.

Over the last four years, Newsom has placed a moratorium on the executions of thousands of death row inmates. He signed a law aimed at reforming the state’s juvenile justice system and recently moved to close a third state prison.

He’s also pushed California’s correctional department to embrace methods used in Norway and other Scandinavian nations, which rehabilitate inmates by trying to normalize life, emphasizing services and support over punishment.

Demonstrating the success of the Norwegian model, Newsom’s administration pointed to a Coastal Carolina University study that found three out of four formerly incarcerated people in Norway don’t re-offend. According to the most recent state data, about 46% of offenders released in California are reconvicted within three years of release.

San Quentin would not be California’s first penitentiary modeling such an approach. At Valley State Prison in Chowchilla, inmates are already experiencing the philosophy first-hand. The facility has a garden, barbecue pit and more comfortable furniture, according to a recent story in The Bee.

Norway’s model is not only seen as an improvement for inmates but also for correctional officers. Nearly a third of California correctional officers have at least one symptom of PTSD, 38% report symptoms of depression and 10% entertain suicidal thoughts, according to a 2018 study from the University of California, Berkeley.

Meanwhile, in Norwegian prisons, officers report high levels of job satisfaction and well-being. They are trained to build relationships with inmates and to use the lowest levels of force when approaching potentially confrontational situations.

“This system isn’t working for anybody,” Newsom said Friday about California’s criminal justice system in comparison to Norway. “We’ve got to recognize that.”

San Quentin changes over the years

San Quentin was a different place when Daniel Silva was an inmate in the 80s. “It was horrible,” he said. “There was a lot of violence.”

The prison has a legacy of violence, including a 1971 escape attempt that left three inmates and three guards dead.

San Quentin has also been the site of 422 executions, starting with hangings in 1893, the gas chamber beginning in 1938 and later lethal injection. In 2019, following years of legal challenges, Newsom issued an executive order that halted further executions. He later shuttered the prison’s death chamber.

But over the years, Silva said he has seen the notorious penitentiary undergo major changes and invest in programming to improve the experiences of its inmates.

San Quentin offers several nationally-recognized programs and services for its inmates. The prison is home to an award-winning inmate-produced newspaper, as well as the first podcast created and produced in prison, Ear Hustle.

It also has its own accredited liberal arts degree program within the prison confines called Mount Tamalpais College. It currently serves about 300 inmates at no cost to the students and has awarded more than 200 degrees, according to college founder and President Jody Lewen.

After spending more than 20 years behind bars, Silva now runs a Sacramento-based nonprofit called Self Awareness and Recovery, which helps prevent and divert youth from entering the state’s prison system and assisting inmates returning home after their release. He’s hopeful that the governor’s announcement will lead more inmates to find their purpose like he did and prepare them to pursue a better life upon release.

“I think the governor is making good choices as far as fixing things,” Silva said. “These types of reforms have to take place if a change is really going to happen.”

This story was originally published March 16, 2023 at 11:42 AM.