Current Affairs

Gov. Gavin Newsom announces plans for facility that was known for its death row

MARIN COUNTY, Calif.—California aims to turn San Quentin State Prison, one of the country’s oldest penal facilities, into a Scandinavian-style center for inmate rehabilitation that it hopes will become a new model for incarceration in America.

Gov. Gavin Newsom said Thursday the storied institution, built in 1852 on the shores of San Francisco Bay, will be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center and converted to focus on providing educational programs and other help for inmates making the transition back into society. 

“California is transforming San Quentin—the state’s most notorious prison with a dark past—into the nation’s most innovative rehabilitation facility focused on building a brighter and safer future,” the Democratic governor said.

The idea represents a sharp turn from San Quentin’s harsh history. Resembling a medieval castle, the prison has housed some of the country’s most feared criminals and serial killers, from Manson Family cult leader Charles Manson to “Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez to “Freeway Killer” William Bonin.

In its death row, the largest in the U.S., 421 prisoners have been executed—215 by hanging and the rest by gas and lethal injection, including the Crips street gang co-founder Stanley Tookie Williams III, who was put to death in 2005. One of the institution’s bloodiest days took place on Aug. 21, 1971, when six men—three inmates and three guards—died in a prison riot. 

Along the way, the prison has gained cultural significance—as the setting for the Jack London novel “The Star Rover,” about a former professor serving a life sentence, and a concert by the country singer Johnny Cash. That performance made an impression on a future country star, Merle Haggard, who was serving time following a conviction for armed robbery.

Over the past two decades or so, California prison officials have been shifting the focus of San Quentin—whose death row the governor ordered gradually shut down in 2019—to be more about rehabilitation. 

The concept of emphasizing rehabilitation more than punishment has been gaining momentum around the world. In Norway, prisons have been redesigned to look more like college campuses, while in Sweden inmates are called clients and get job training. In the U.S., states including Colorado have embraced the rehabilitation approach more.

California officials cited statistics that show rehabilitation leads to lower recidivism. According to a 2014 report by the Rand Corp., inmates who participate in correctional education programs were 43% less likely to return to prison than those who didn’t. State officials said they spend $14.5 billion a year on prisons; 3.5% of that is on rehabilitation.

“This system isn’t working for anybody,” Mr. Newsom said during a visit Friday to San Quentin during which he addressed inmates, staff and media in a former mattress factory at the prison that he said was going to be used to house expanded education and help programs. “We have got to recognize that.”

With inmates in blue prison garb applauding his remarks, the upbeat mood was a contrast from the grim surroundings of the facility, where guards sit in towers and razor wire lines the walls. Media were let in through old iron doors and had to pass through several security checkpoints before arriving at the 81,000-square-foot factory, which has been closed for years.

Some said San Quentin is so old it would make better sense to tear it down and sell off the property, which lies on one of the last undeveloped stretches of San Francisco Bay in affluent Marin County. 

“To throw more money at that prison seems crazy,” said Michael Rushford, president of Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a victims’ advocacy group in Sacramento, Calif.

Marcus Robinson, senior marketing consultant for Coldwell Banker Realty in Mill Valley, Calif., said that San Quentin’s presence reduces by as much as 50% the number of prospective buyers for multimillion-dollar homes in nearby Tiburon within its view. 

“I don’t know one person who wants to keep that prison in Marin County,” Mr. Robinson said.

Mr. Newsom said he and his staff considered closing San Quentin for cost reasons, but dismissed such a move because the prison already is a leader in rehabilitation in the state and benefits by its proximity to so many education programs and volunteers in the Bay Area. 

“Had we shut it down, we would have fallen backwards,” the governor said.

San Quentin’s death row still housed more than 500 inmates as of the fourth quarter of last year, as the state, which hasn’t executed an inmate since 2006, moves them out of the facility.

Inmates considered less dangerous now experience a different type of incarceration. Rehabilitation has become a stronger focus at the prison over the past two decades or so, with a newspaper, film center and even podcast station started over that time. 

When he transferred to San Quentin about 10 years ago following a stay at a higher-security prison, Eddie Herena couldn’t believe his good fortune. “During the day, it felt like a college campus,” said Mr. Herena, 39, who was paroled in 2018 after serving eight years for second-degree murder. “You get reminded you are in jail when you get locked in at night.”

Mr. Herena is now a photographer, a skill he honed while working on the prison newspaper, the San Quentin News.

Kate McQueen, an editor of the nonprofit Prison Journalism Project who volunteers at the paper, said inmates at San Quentin are always busy when she arrives. “There’s a very large yard, and you can see all sorts of people playing their instruments, working out,” Ms. McQueen said. “It’s a place where people incarcerated get to interact with people from the outside world.”

The governor’s new plan for San Quentin, which he aims to kick-start with $20 million in this year’s state budget, should boost enrollment of inmates at Mount Tamalpais College, a two-year program that now serves about 300 of the prison’s 3,300 inmates, said Jody Lewen, president of the liberal-arts school. 

The prison’s current three classes in software coding and one in audiovisual engineering, which now serve 60 students, should also be expanded, said Sydney Heller, executive director of Last Mile, a nonprofit that puts them on.

Steve Brooks, who has served 29 years for crimes including robbery and burglary, said he hopes to get a job in journalism after earning two associate of arts degrees and working as the editor of the San Quentin News while in custody. 

“It’s helped me learn how to become part of communities,” said Mr. Brooks, 51, who showed visitors around a newsroom with desktop computers in a former prison laundry.

Andrew Hardy, who is scheduled for release in 10 months after serving seven years for second-degree robbery, said it was in society’s interest for him not to commit any more crimes.

“I think the governor is honoring victims to get us prepared so there won’t be more victims,” said Mr. Hardy, 43, as he prepared the layout for next month’s San Quentin News.

Write to Jim Carlton at Jim.Carlton@wsj.com

Attributions: This article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal on March 17, 2023. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada.

The Biden administration sent Phoeun You, a former child refugee, to Cambodia after more than four decades in the US. Governor Gavin Newsom has the power to bring him back

Over a video call, Phoeun You showed me the nighttime view from his balcony: The soft glow of street lamps lit up a line of low-rise buildings and a snarl of electric cables. He was calling from Sen Sok, a fast-modernizing district in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was a beautiful sight; but I was distracted by the bittersweet tone of his voice. It had only been three months since the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported Phoeun You, 49, to Cambodia. He was granted parole from California’s San Quentin State Prison in August 2021. He’s free, but he can’t return to the only home he remembers.

Phoeun You, a former Cambodian child refugee, served more than 25 years for murder. In 1995, when Phoeun You was 20, he killed a 17-year-old while trying to shoot someone else in retaliation for hurting his family. Less than 24 hours before he was due to be paroled and reunited with his family, Phoeun You said, he was transferred by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to an ICE detention facility, where he spent several months in limbo before being deported without warning.

During his incarceration, he got an associate’s degree, became a certified crisis counselor, and was a reporter for the San Quentin News, an inmate-produced newspaper. It was there in 2014 that we met; I was a volunteer editor for the paper for two semesters while studying at the University of California, Berkeley.

Sitting at his desk in Phnom Penh, Phoeun You appeared the same as I’d remembered: a man of small-to-medium build with a shaved head, several tattoos, and a disarming smile that crinkled his eyes. After answering his questions about my life and journalism, I asked him how he was adjusting to Cambodia and freedom. He replied, “It was rough when I first landed. So many pieces [of life in the United States] are unfinished. I didn’t get to say goodbye to my family, and that was devastating. And even though I know I’m free, for the first month I didn’t leave the house. Even buying groceries was overwhelming. The world was strange to me: I don’t know the language, culture. I was shell-shocked.”

Phoeun You was 4 years old when he fled the Khmer Rouge in 1975 with his parents, grandmother, and nine siblings. He recalled his father, a village doctor, carrying him in a sling on his back as the family struggled for days on foot to reach the Thai border. His memories of their escape from Cambodia are murky, but there are snapshots: the smell of wildfire, lost children crying for their families, a man lying beside a tree with his mouth open, lifeless.

After reaching Thailand, the Yous spent a few years at a refugee camp before relocating to Utah in 1980 to live with a Mormon family who took them in as part of a church program. Roughly five years later, the family settled in Long Beach, Calif., after hearing that a growing Cambodian community was being established there. It was meant to be a fresh start. Long Beach was supposed to be a place for them to build a new life and heal alongside other Cambodians.

At the time, Phouen You and his family were among the nearly 158,000 Cambodians, mostly refugees, who resettled in the United States between 1975 and 1994. The number of refugees who fled Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos totaled 1.1 million, making it the largest mass refugee resettlement in US history.

But the country wasn’t prepared to receive them. Refugees from Southeast Asia were resettled “ad hoc” and “scattered across isolated areas in the US,” according to a report from the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC), a US advocacy group founded in 1979 to respond to the refugee crisis.

Volunteer organizations tasked with helping the refugees weren’t given clear instructions on how to support them beyond greeting them upon arrival, matching families with sponsors—as was the case with Phoeun You’s family—or occasionally providing one-time cash assistance, according to SEARAC.

Left to fend for themselves, many families slipped into poverty. Among Cambodians like the Yous who arrived during or shortly after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, only 40 to 50 percent were able to secure blue-collar jobs. The rest, including Phoeun You’s family, relied on welfare and public assistance.

In the years that followed, the family lived paycheck to paycheck and changed houses with every rental increase—at least 10 times. Living with at least 15 family members at any given time in a three-to-four bedroom house, Phoeun You sometimes had to sleep on the living-room floor. Food and clothing was scarce. But beyond finances, the Yous found themselves culturally ill-equipped to navigate inner-city life in Long Beach, which had an ethnically diverse population and a growing crime rate.

During the first five years that the family lived there, the number of violent crimes jumped from over 4,000 to more than 9,000. Phoeun You remembers being scared by the constant sound of gunfire and sirens as he walked home from school. On the streets and at school, racism and discrimination were rampant.

Gang violence was also a growing menace. In 1986, the year Phoeun You turned 13, Long Beach reported its largest annual increase in crime in the past five years. By 1989, it was recording the biggest jump in serious crimes of any major Californian city, with police blaming the trend on an influx of gangs from Los Angeles. More than 30 percent of murders were related to drugs or gangs, which would grow to encompass 70 street groups, totaling about 11,500 members, according to the Los Angeles Times.

When he was 13, Phoeun You joined a gang that his brother was involved with. The gang gave him a sense of acceptance, safety, and belonging—all things he lacked and craved. He began cutting school, drinking, and experimenting with drugs.

When he was 16, a rival gang shot up his house two nights in a row, in retaliation for his brother’s shooting one of their members. No one was hurt, but a bullet that passed through the door nearly hit Phoeun You’s sister, who was pregnant at the time. A year later, his brother was hospitalized after the rival gang shot him eight times.

Reflecting on his childhood now, Phoeun You said it was only a matter of time until things went terribly wrong. That moment came on March 23, 1995, when he shot into a crowd of what he believed at the time to be gang members who had assaulted him and his teenage nephew the day before. Instead, he killed an innocent 17-year-old boy and injured four others. In 1996, a jury convicted Phoeun You, 20, of first-degree murder, and he received a prison sentence of 35 years to life.

Phoeun You’s incarceration came during a prison boom, resulting from the period’s “tough on crime” policies. During the 1990s, the population of Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) in prison rose by 250 percent, according to a report by SEARAC and others. Between 1977 and 1997, arrests of AAPI youth catapulted by 726 percent, and Asian juveniles in California were twice as likely to be tried as adults as their white counterparts.

The US also underwent sweeping immigration reforms in 1996, with President Bill Clinton signing into law the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act and the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act—measures that dramatically broadened the range of people vulnerable to deportation. The reforms included a retroactive expansion of the types of crimes classified as “aggravated felonies”—a conviction that could lead to deportation—to include a variety of less-serious crimes with shorter prison sentences, and the removal of the right for noncitizens to appear before an immigration judge to challenge their deportation.

Since 1998, more than 17,000 Southeast Asians—many of whom, like Phoeun You, arrived as refugees and have green cards—have received final orders of deportation, according to SEARAC. But of these, some 15,000 Southeast Asians are still residing in the country, and ICE could deport them at any moment. About 80 percent of the orders given to Southeast Asians are based on old criminal convictions, which account for roughly 17 percent of all final orders of removal.

According to statistics collected by SEARAC, 3,106 Cambodians were given deportation orders and 1,067 deported between 1998 and 2020.

Despite being eligible for naturalization, most refugees had limited resources to pursue citizenship and were unaware that failing to do so could render them subject to deportation if they were convicted of a crime. By the time the rest of Phoeun You’s family applied for and gained citizenship, both he and his brother were already incarcerated. Under US law, those convicted of murder or an aggravated felony on or after November 29, 1990, are permanently barred from naturalization.

Deportees with aggravated felonies are also permanently banned from returning to the US, said So Young Lee, an immigrant rights attorney at the Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus who represents Phoeun You. While people with other aggravated felonies can apply for a waiver, those who have been convicted of murder do not have that option, she added.

While deportations were briefly halted in 2017 when the Cambodian government refused to issue travel documents for deportees, they resumed a few months later after the Trump administration responded by imposing visa sanctions on Cambodian foreign ministry officials. Cambodia has repeatedly urged the US to amend its 2002 repatriation agreement on “humanitarian” grounds, most recently at a meeting with President Joe Biden at the ASEAN Summit in November.

Bill Ong Hing, professor of law and migration studies at the University of San Francisco, told me that there are two ways to fight against a deportation order, but both have limited chances of success. One is to overturn or set aside the original conviction through the judicial system; the other is advocating for a pardon from a governor.

“I started doing immigration law in 1974 and represented many who had committed serious crimes. But back then, you could ask for a waiver [of deportation]. That’s what ought to be reinstated: a chance for a judge to assess the person’s situation and see if they deserve a chance,” Hing said. “I’ve always thought we’re [part of] a society that believes in rehabilitation. It’s a disappointment.”

Prison rehabilitation programs were the lifeline that saved Phoeun You, but it didn’t happen right away, he said. For the first seven years of his incarceration, he was trapped in a cycle of depression. Faced with a life sentence, he didn’t believe he could ever reunite with his family, and gave up on having a meaningful life. He would frequently pick fights with inmates and use drugs and alcohol as a means of escape.

But in 2003, everything changed. Phoeun You received the news that his sister had been killed—a jealous boyfriend had shot her and left her to die in a parking lot.

“I automatically went into shock. It was the first time I cried during my whole prison sentence,” Phoeun You said. “After soaking in that pain, I started reflecting on my parents and how they must be feeling. Then finally, I started thinking about the pain I might have caused my victim’s family. That was my first seed of empathy.”

The tragedy of his sister’s death became the catalyst for him to come to terms with the crime he had committed, and eventually embark on his journey of rehabilitation.

By the time we met in San Quentin, Phoeun You had cofounded ROOTS, or Restoring Our Original True Selves—a restorative justice program that helps AAPI inmates address intergenerational trauma. He was also writing personal essays reflecting on his crime for San Quentin News.

I remember sitting next to him on a Saturday afternoon, reading a story he wrote about a man in a car shooting a child on his way home from school. It ended with a vivid scene of the boy lying in a hospital bed, realizing that he was about to die. “I wrote that from the perspective of my victim,” I recall him casually saying, in between edits.

My first reaction was disbelief. It didn’t seem possible that the person sitting in front of me, whom I knew to be incredibly warm and compassionate, could have committed such a terrible crime. Looking back, I now credit the time we spent working together for helping me understand the extent to which people are capable of reform, if they’re given an opportunity and safe space to do so.

Unfortunately, it’s a belief that remains difficult to accept. Attempts to stop the practice of “double punishment” have stalled both federally and on the state level, including in California. Last September, a bill called the VISION Act, which would have blocked Californian jails and prisons from transferring noncitizens to immigration authorities, fell three votes short of passing in the state Senate. According to Mandy Diêc, SEARAC’s California deputy director, opposition from police chiefs played a “big role” in shifting support from the bill, which is now being redrafted to target people more narrowly.

The act could have prevented Phoeun You’s deportation; it could have given him a chance to reunite with his family and community upon release. “A few senators said they were on board until the day of—then they just didn’t step up. It was sad to see,” he said. “If it had passed, I would have been able to seek freedom or at least fought my case and said goodbye to my parents.”

Despite these setbacks, Kham Moua, national deputy director at SEARAC, said he has witnessed more political support for this issue since the end of the Trump administration. In recent years, SEARAC has supported the introduction of the New Way Forward Act, which would roll back harmful immigration policies, and the Southeast Asia Deportation Relief Act aiming to limit deportations from the community.

“I think the current administration has been sympathetic to this community. When you really think about it, it’s really us making sure that the refugees we brought in are able to stay with their families,” Moua told me.

Moua added that growing awareness of anti-Asian hate and a recent strengthening of Asian American identity has helped bring attention to the plight of Southeast Asians, which is often subsumed by other issues.

“Oftentimes we think about the US role in Vietnam, but there isn’t a strong understanding of how the US impacted the entire region, such as our role in the Cambodian genocide,” Moua said. Between 1965 and 1973, the US launched a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia that killed an estimated 50,000 to 150,000 people—creating conditions that historians say gave rise to the Khmer Rouge. “We tore a lot of these families apart, and we’re doing it again when we’re deporting them.”

In late February, I called Phoeun You again. He was standing on his balcony, but this time in the warm afternoon sun, where he often spends a few peaceful moments watching life unfold on the streets below. He’s still learning to adjust, he said, but he can now buy his groceries with ease and feels ready to face new challenges head-on.

He told me he hasn’t given up on returning home. He is campaigning for California Governor Gavin Newsom to grant him a pardon. There is some hope: Last year, deportee Sophea Phea, who spent 11 years in Cambodia, was able to return through a 2020 pardon she gained through years of community and legal advocacy efforts.

Even while abroad, he has continued to support Californian communities through speaking out about the prison-to-deportation pipeline and running workshops on restorative justice. He’s also training to become a certified teacher in hopes of using his skills to help Cambodian children, and participating in local service projects such as a walk to raise funds for cancer treatment.

Moving forward, he wants to focus on healing from his trauma and supporting his family. Since his arrival in Cambodia, he’s had the opportunity to visit some relatives and begin the process of unpacking the more painful aspects of his family’s past. Such conversations were never possible when he was growing up because his family was always struggling to simply survive, let alone reflect on their trauma, he said. “I want to give back. I want to make sure my family knows I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused. It’s been a lot to hold for me, and for them. Now, everybody is climbing out of that darkness.”

Attributions: This article originally appeared in The Nation on March 10, 2023. Photo courtesy of Joyce Xi and Phoeun You with Advancing Justice-Asian Law Caucus.

Reason 55 is a podcast hosted by law enforcement veteran, Stephen B. Walker, each episode of Reason 55 will bring together diverse and determined people doing incredible work that helps to affect our world for the better. Reason 55 gives a mic to voices from invisible operations that touch lives every day and features discussions that provide listeners with different perspectives and prescriptions to be an Evolution of Hope.

David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole when he was 17. In many states—including Pennsylvania, where Gonzalez was sentenced—there are few, if any, college opportunities for people with such lengthy sentences. 

Still, Gonzalez eventually fought his way into Villanova University’s privately funded college program at Graterford Prison, the maximum security facility where he was incarcerated. There he earned a bachelor’s degree in education and marketing.

While incarcerated, Gonzalez developed a decades-long friendship with journalist Maria Hinojosa. The two would later work together to document his time in prison and subsequent release, in 2017 after a Supreme Court decision that ruled automatic life sentences without parole for juveniles as unconstitutional, in an eponymous podcast, Suave, which won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize. 

Now, Gonzalez is a support coach with I Am More, a reentry program for formerly incarcerated students at Philadelphia Community College. He also co-hosts Death by Incarceration, which will be featuring episodes this fall focused on the various ways people in prison get an education. 

In August, journalist Rahsaan “New York” Thomas called Gonzalez from a phone booth on the ground tier of San Quentin’s North Block. Thomas, who was sentenced to 55-years-to-life in California, is the inside host of the Pulitzer-nominated podcast Ear Hustle. 

Like Gonzalez, Thomas was able to earn a degree behind bars. As he wrote for Open Campus, it was one of the factors cited in the commutation he received from California Gov. Gavin Newsom earlier this year. At the end of September, Thomas got word that he is suitable for parole following Newsom’s clemency and he expects to go home sometime in early 2023.  

Thomas and Gonzalez talk about fighting the system and the role of education in prison when you think you’re never getting out.

Read New York’s interview with Suave here. We co-published the story with Slate.

To listen to the entire conversation between Thomas and Gonzalez, check out this episode of Death by Incarceration.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Open Campus, College Inside on Oct. 20, 2022.  Photo/Rahsaan “New York” Thomas and David Luis “Suave” Gonzalez both graduated from college while serving a life sentence in prison. Illustration by Charlotte West/Open Campus. Photo of Thomas by Eddie Herena. Photo of San Quentin by Shutterstock.

Clearing a final hurdle

One of our College Inside contributors got big news: Rahsaan “New York” Thomas, the inside host of the Ear Hustle podcast out of San Quentin, got word that he is going home in about 5 months. He cleared the last big hurdle last week when the California parole board signed off on Governor Newsom’s clemency.

Even though Rahsaan finished his associate’s degree – one of the factors cited by Newsom’s office as a reason for granting clemency  – in 2020, he also just celebrated his graduation in June. (Rahsaan recently wrote about his winding journey to a college degree for The Marshall Project.)

Don’t miss Rahsaan’s story we published earlier this year on why education matters for people serving extreme sentences. He’s also helping to build a prison-to-journalism pipeline with his non-profit, Empowerment Avenue.

“For those of us serving long sentences, recidivism rates and jobs can’t measure the success of our college education,” Rahsaan writes. “My pursuit of a degree started in 2016, approximately 16 years into a 55-years-to-life sentence. I would have to live to be 85 years old to evaluate whether an associate’s degree will break the cycle of incarceration that’s circled my adulthood.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Open Campus on Sept. 9, 2022.  Photo/R.J. Lozada

In January 2022, after an arduous 18-month application and review process, Mount Tamalpais College was granted Initial Accreditation by the Accrediting Commission for Junior and Community Colleges, making it the first accredited independent liberal arts college dedicated specifically to serving incarcerated students.

Operating out of San Quentin State Prison — the oldest operating correctional facility in California, tucked away on a peninsula just outside of San Francisco — the staff at Mount Tamalpais has long been dedicated to ensuring that students on the inside receive a high-quality education at least comparable to what they might receive at a quality educational institution on the outside. 

Along with providing “an intellectually rigorous, inclusive Associate of Arts degree program and College Preparatory Program, free of charge, to people at San Quentin State Prison,” Mount Tamalpais also seeks to “expand access to quality higher education for incarcerated people, and

to foster the values of equity, civic engagement, independence of thought, and freedom of expression,” according to its website.

NationSwell Council member Jody Lewen, the founder and president of Mount Tamalpais College, recently sat down with us to talk about advocating for academic quality and inclusivity and the process of building Mount Tamalpais’s programs into what they are today — a process, she said, that “really strained my atheism.”

Read our full interview with Jody below:

NationSwell: Tell us a little bit about how you ended up working in prison education.

Jody Lewen, founder and president of Mount Tamalpais College: I grew up in Manhattan and went to Wesleyan in Middletown, Connecticut, for undergrad, and then a short time later moved to Berlin and ended up doing my Master’s in comparative literature and philosophy. I came to California in 1994 to do my doctorate at Berkeley, but while I was about halfway through working on my dissertation, I very coincidentally learned about this college program at San Quentin that was run entirely by volunteers and became very interested.

I knew nothing about prison, it was not a field I had read about or studied. I had done a lot of political work and read a lot of history and literature as an undergrad and was very aware, in a mostly abstract sense, of suffering in the world, but I really hadn’t found a way to integrate my political interests with my academic career path. But I thought the program sounded really interesting, so I ended up going into San Quentin in the spring of 1999 and teaching a public speaking class and really loving it.

NS: What were some of the early challenges or surprises you faced in doing this work?

Mount Tamalpais College’s Jody Lewen: It was a lot of my own demons about education — there were so many very humbling ironies. I had never interacted with adults who were as talented and intelligent whose basic skills in reading and writing were as poor, and it made me realize that I had a lot of ignorant assumptions about the correlation between basic skills and intellect.

When I got that first batch of papers back, I didn’t even know how to grade them, because there were so many problems. So I eventually went back and had a conversation with the students where I said look, guys, I’m realizing there’s all this stuff you haven’t been taught about college writing and I’m not sure how to handle this but I don’t really feel comfortable letting this stuff slide.

They just overwhelmingly were like, ‘Please don’t patronize us, people have been underestimating us our entire lives.’ They didn’t want to be in a prison college program; they wanted to be in college, and they wanted to learn what they really needed to know to be successful in the outside academic and professional worlds. 

NationSwell: How did you go from working as a volunteer at San Quentin to becoming the founder and president of Mount Tamalpais?

Lewen: I had gotten very interested in the recruitment and training of faculty because very early on I had become aware that they were not acquiring the basic skills they were going to need to be successful in a rigorous academic environment. It became a question of, should the standards we’re holding our students to on the inside be the same ones we’re holding our students to on the outside? And if not, why not?

I’m the most unreligious person to walk the face of the earth, and yet a series of things began happening that really strained my atheism. It was like an intervention: We started to realize that the problem was not just that they were so underprepared academically; the problem was us, it was that we didn’t have the resources or the time to build a program that really met their needs.

And then the fellow who was running the program left, and the whole thing collapsed on me like a house. I began to tear out walls and floors and ceilings; our courses weren’t in compliance with the minimum number of contact hours, so I extended the semester from 10 weeks to 13 weeks, increased the class meetings to twice a week from once a week, and began to recruit teachers who knew how to teach developmental writing and math. And we basically overhauled the whole pre-college writing and math program.

NationSwell: What are some of the things you think about in trying to recruit new educators to meet these challenges?

Lewen: To be frank, most people assume that prison is a scary place to be, understandably. We’ve all been taught to imagine incarcerated people as ugly, predatory, not very bright. So getting people to overcome their physical fear of prison is huge. It helps a lot, as the program has grown, we have so many current and former faculty members who can’t stop talking about what it’s like to teach there, and they’re really our recruitment army. 

And then the other thing I’ve noticed is that the universe of people who are interested in prisons and serving the incarcerated are often relatively politically similar to each other. The Bay Area is obviously quite progressive, so cultivating intellectual diversity among the faculty can be quite challenging. I take really seriously the fact that our students are really diverse in every way —

not just racially or ethnically but also culturally, ideologically, politically, they’re from all corners of the universe. So diversity is also an important value in our recruitment processes.

NationSwell: What can interested members do to help support the work that you do, or prison education more broadly?

Lewen: For the fall semester our instructors are mostly lined up already, but in general we’re always looking for volunteers. For the credit classes the lead instructor has to have at least a master’s degree in the field, but for the developmental education classes and also any tutoring roles, the requirements are a little bit more flexible. [Anyone interested in volunteering can get in touch through Mount Tamailpais’s website here.]

We’re  always looking to connect with individual and institutional funders who are excited about the idea of providing high quality educational opportunities to currently incarcerated people. Unlike traditional colleges, we charge no tuition and receive no state or federal funding. This is fantastic for preserving our autonomy and our capacity to innovate, but it’s also real work to raise $5 million a year. People can always reach out to us, or directly support our work at mttamcollege.org/donate. 

There are also other nonprofit organizations that support reentry and other ancillary fields that can always use volunteers.A number of excellent organizations in the Bay Area have been founded by our alumni, either while they were still inside or once they got out. Some of those organizations are:

• Bonafide (bonafidelife.org), an amazing reentry organization that works with people from the moment they’re released and then stays with them throughout their lifetime helping them adjust and thrive. 
• The San Quentin News, the prison newspaper that’s in a period of tremendous growth right now.
• Mend Collaborative, a restorative justice organization that was recently co-founded by an alumnus of ours.
• Veterans Healing Veterans, founded by a former student, which supports currently or formerly incarcerated veterans.
• Ear Hustle, a podcast that was co-founded by a former MTC faculty member.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in NationSwell, August 29, 2022.

Jody Lewen, Ph.D., first entered San Quentin prison in 1999 as a volunteer instructor in an educational outreach program to inmates. As a graduate student in the rhetoric department at U.C. Berkeley, Lewen was teaching classes on campus and working on her dissertation. “I started teaching at San Quentin out of interest and excitement at the idea of being able to deliver quality education to people who didn’t necessarily have it, but it was something to do on the side,” Lewen recalls. “My plan was to finish my dissertation and go into the conventional job market. Then I fell in love with the program and got very engaged.”

When the program coordinator announced he was leaving, and no one stepped up to keep it going, Lewen decided to take over. “I saw how little anybody cared what happened to people in prison,” she says. “That’s a precarious situation for any group of humans.”

Lewen wondered what the program could become if there was enough manpower and resources to support it, and decided to found the nonprofit Prison University Project to raise funds for expansion. As an increasing number of inmates enrolled in classes, the Prison University Project became the infrastructure for a robust academic program offering a general education associate of arts degree and intensive college preparatory courses. In the past two decades, nearly 4,000 students have participated.

“We’re letting people who have been marginalized, degraded and left for dead know that somebody does care about them,” Lewen says. “I derive so much satisfaction from feeling useful. Seeing the good we can do just by showing up and taking the time to give our students a high-quality education – that’s fuel for me.”