Current Affairs

The Office of Governor Gavin Newsom issued this press release on May 05, 2023

SACRAMENTO — Harnessing the expertise of distinguished criminal justice, public safety, and rehabilitation professionals, along with justice-impacted individuals, representatives of crime victims, and survivors, today Governor Gavin Newsom announced the members of the San Quentin Transformation Advisory Council. The Advisory Council is tasked with assisting the administration in delivering on the Governor’s announcement to transform San Quentin State Prison by 2025 into a one-of-a-kind rehabilitation center focused on improving public safety through rehabilitation and education via a scalable “California Model” that can be utilized across the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR).

WHAT GOVERNOR NEWSOM SAID: “In order to transform San Quentin into the nation’s most innovative rehabilitation facility focused on building a brighter and safer future, we need a deep and diverse bench of expertise. That’s exactly what the members of this Advisory Council deliver. Through their time and talent, these leaders will help us build a scalable model across California that will advance justice, safer communities, and true rehabilitation.”

The members of the Advisory Council include:

• Scott Budnick, Founder, Anti-Recidivism Coalition
• Neil Flood, State Vice President, California Correctional Peace Officers Association
• Tinisch Hollins, Executive Director, Californians for Safety and Justice
• Katie James, Chief, CDCR’s Office of Victim and Survivor Rights and Services
• Terah Lawyer-Harper, Executive Director, Creating Restorative Opportunities and Programs
• Kenyatta Leal, Executive Director, Next Chapter Project
• Jody Lewen, President, Mount Tamalpais College
• Sam Lewis, Executive Director, Anti-Recidivism Coalition
• Billie Mizell, Founder, Acting with Compassion and Truth; Chair Emeritus of the Insight Prison Project
• Jonathan Moscone, Executive Director, California Arts Council
• Dr. Mimi Silbert, President and CEO, Delancey Street
• U.S. Marine Corps Major General James Michael Myatt (ret.)
• Dr. Alison Pachynski, Chief Medical Executive, San Quentin State Prison
• Chris Redlitz, Executive Director, The Last Mile
• Michael Romano, Director and Founder, Three Strikes Project at Stanford University
• Jesse Vasquez, Executive Director, Pollen Initiative

Additionally, the Council includes Co-Chairs Dr. Brie Williams, San Quentin Warden Ronald Broomfield, and Amity President and CEO Doug Bond. They will be joined by Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, who has been named the Governor’s Lead Adviser on this effort. In his role as Lead Adviser, Steinberg will serve as the main liaison between the Advisory Council and the Governor’s Office.

The historic effort at San Quentin, never pursued at this scale in the United States, will serve as a nationwide evidence-backed model to advance a more effective justice system that builds safer communities. Building on justice innovation efforts taking place across CDCR — including cutting-edge initiatives at Valley State, Central California Women’s Facility, Salinas Valley, and California Medical Facility — the Advisory Council will develop a robust, evidence-based vision and thoughtful implementation plan to reimagine and strengthen programming, education, and rehabilitation efforts and opportunities at San Quentin. Working alongside San Francisco-based design thinking firm IDEO, and soliciting ideas and input from a wide range of experts, community stakeholders, and program providers, the Advisory Council will recommend transformational programmatic, cultural, and physical change to San Quentin that can serve as a practical model that can be replicated and scaled to other institutions.

Since taking office, Governor Newsom has taken nation-leading action to strengthen public safety through justice reforms and innovation: He placed a moratorium on the death penalty, bolstered support for victims and survivors of crime, ended the state’s use of private for-profit prisons, took action to disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, announced sweeping reforms to end juvenile imprisonment, advanced jury representation, expanded the number of Board of Parole commissioners, signed legislation to build trust between communities and law enforcement, and announced record-level funding to bolster public safety, including through the Real Public Safety plan.

For more information about San Quentin’s transformation and the Advisory Council, click here.

Attributions: This Press Release originally appeared on the Office of the Governor of California website on May 5, 2023. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada.

New initiatives at Mount Tamalpais College allow people incarcerated at San Quentin to design and teach their own workshops

Sherman Newman, an incarcerated man, is both a student and a teacher at California’s Mount Tamalpais College (MTC), a liberal arts college in San Quentin State Prison. He is one of the thousands of people who have attended MTC, the only accredited, independent liberal arts college in the U.S. that operates its main campus out of a prison. 

Formerly known as the Prison University Project and Patten University, MTC has provided free education to incarcerated people at San Quentin for over 20 years, officially receiving accreditation in January 2022. San Quentin—California’s oldest prison—is infamous for many reasons, including its high death row population and recent botched pandemic response that led to the death of 28 incarcerated people. In recent years, it has been applauded for its media center, education opportunities, and overall shift toward rehabilitation.

Studies show that educational programs in prison often correlate with lower recidivism rates. Research funded by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Assistance found that incarcerated people who participate in college programs have a 43% lower recidivism rate than their peers. However, MTC Chief Academic Officer, Amy Jamgochian said the college doesn’t exist to reduce recidivism rates. Rather, MTC is grounded in the belief that every person, regardless of incarceration status, is deserving of a quality education. 

“There is this assumption that a prison education is a dumbed-down version of ‘real’ education,” said Jamgochian. “That is absolutely inequitable; it would be incredibly patronizing to lower standards for incarcerated people.”

Hundreds of volunteers make up MTC’s faculty, with many of the professors hailing from neighboring universities like the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University. In the last year, MTC began extending some of its teaching positions to incarcerated people.

“There is no way to generalize what incarcerated people want to study. We have politically conservative and progressive students and some students who simply don’t want to be thinking about incarceration all the time. We’ve even had students request Sanskrit classes,” Jamgochian said. “We have to acknowledge the breadth of expertise and interest inside prisons—too many [people] make assumptions about what [incarcerated students] want.”

For nearly a year, MTC students have been invited to submit proposals for extracurricular workshops that they want to teach. Though these workshops are not for credit, MTC’s administration said it takes them just as seriously as other classes, reviewing the proposed syllabi and prospective instructors as they would for an accredited course. The extracurricular program has led to at least six new courses, all of which have been extremely popular among MTC students. 

“It’s been very exciting to see the vast array of interest,” said Jamgochian.

Lee Jasper, a professional musician, currently teaches a class on music theory. Sounds of bass guitar emanate from his classroom, luring in other music enthusiasts. 

“I played with a band while I was in the U.S. Air Force,” Jasper said, noting that he later taught a supplemental master guitar program for students at the University of California, Davis. 

Jasper’s music lessons would normally cost hundreds of dollars. At San Quentin, he offers them for free. 

“My rehabilitation demands that I be in service to my community,” he said. “I want to make my knowledge and abilities available to [all my students] to help improve their skills.”

Jasper’s workshop begins at the basics and ends with students being able to “read, write, compose, and discuss complex melodic theory,” according to his syllabus. One of his students, 68-year-old Ammen Shinti, has played music since he was four. 

“Being involved keeps me sharp,” said Shinti. “I also like to nurture new talent and show the world how awesome we [incarcerated people] are.”

Some workshops at MTC allow for co-teaching opportunities. Kelton O’Connor and Arthur Jackson, the latter of whom is also an MTC employee, currently teach a workshop together on diabetes justice. In their class, students sit in a circle to discuss the intersection of food and environmental justice.

“This class is designed to encourage people to start advocating for solutions to global warming,” said Jackson. Outside of class, Jackson and O’Connor also advocate for more fresh food in prisons. “A lot of what we eat, especially meat, contributes to destroying the ozone layer,” Jackson said.

MTC workshops also provide an educational space for incarcerated students and teachers to process traumatic experiences. Harry C. Goodall’s course, “Maturing In Modern Times: Overcoming Educational Trauma,” helps incarcerated students develop their emotional intelligence to uncover, understand, and overcome their educational trauma. Educational trauma can stem from being bullied by teachers or students, having low self-esteem and grades, and other harmful academic experiences due to behavioral issues, problems at home, or learning disabilities. For many incarcerated individuals, these experiences defined their early education. Goodall’s course helps students move past stigmas around learning disabilities and regain confidence and control over their education. 

MTC’s extracurricular courses coincide with the recent reinstatement of Pell Grants for incarcerated people. Pell Grants provide federally funded education for students with “exceptional financial need.” The U.S. Department of Education originally offered these federal funds to incarcerated students, but the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act decimated prison education programs for more than two decades. In 2015, former President Barack Obama restored an experimental version of Pell Grants for incarcerated people, and in 2021, President Joe Biden restored them in their entirety. 

Fortunately, as a nonprofit supported by private donations and grants, MTC is not reliant on federal funding to provide students with free education. “In general, historically, public funding for prison rehabilitation has depended on political tides—politicians move to eliminate it as a way to be ‘tough on crime,’” said Jamgochian, who said she supports any type of prison education but values the advantages MTC has as an independent institution. 

Despite the divergent challenges and benefits that independent and federally funded prison education programs encounter, both must approach restoring education, dignity, and respect to incarcerated people with thought, caution, and—in Jamgochian’s words—“an eye to equity and maintaining high standards.”

As colleges like MTC launch new initiatives, incarcerated people will regain not only their right to an education but also the opportunity to educate others. Peer teaching can facilitate greater understanding, support, and comfort between teachers and students. These efforts also boost the confidence and self-esteem of those leading the courses, who have a wealth of knowledge and experience worth sharing.

“I had low self-esteem growing up that I used gang activity and leadership to conceal,” Newman said “Now I am a teacher, a leader, and that has made my self-esteem go through the roof. I feel like I can do anything I want in life with these skill sets.”

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Prism on March 31, 2023.

Top photo: Mount Tamalpais student Arthur Jackson, pictured above, is co-teaching the course Diabetes Justice with MTC student Kelton O’Connor. Photo credit: Eddie Herena

STEVEN BROOKS

Steven Brooks is the editor-in-chief of San Quentin News, manager and staff writer at Wall City, and member of Empowerment Avenue. He has written numerous articles for different publications and is the… More by Steven Brooks

OLIVIA HEFFERNAN

Olivia Heffernan is a writer, editor, and award-winning filmmaker. Her work explores the intersection of race, labor, and incarceration. She has written for Jacobin, The Baffler, The Nation, among many… More by Olivia Heffernan

The Right to Write (R2W) project is an editorial initiative where Prism works with incarcerated writers to share their reporting and perspectives across our verticals and coverage areas. Learn more about R2W and how to pitch here.

For three decades, the Center for Volunteer and Nonprofit Leadership has brought together leaders of Marin’s strong community of nonprofit agencies and their volunteers for an annual Heart of Marin luncheon that is an inspiration.

It their It reflects a Marin that gets lost in its affluent facade, a collection of community-spirited leaders and volunteers who are driven by their heartfelt desire to make a difference. It showcases the many among us with big hearts intent on helping others, from fellow students to injured economic injured animals and from men behind bars at San Quentin to those struggling with prejudices toward their gender identities or economic and racial inequities.

Sponsors Marin Sponsors including Bank of Marin, PG&E, Harbor Point Charitable Foundation, BioMarin, Potrero Group, Redwood Credit Union, the Marin Community or Community Foundation, Comerica Bank, Kaiser Permanente San Rafael-Petaluma and the IJ helped make the luncheon possible or underwrote cash awards.

Winners included:

• Tiana Wimmer, for leadership as a board member of Enriching Lives Through Music, the San Rafael-based nonprofit providing youths access to immersive music education.

 • The Rev. Jane Adams Spahr, winner of the Lifetime Achievement Award, for tireless work in AIDS response and as a longtime beacon for the LGBTQ+ community.

• Marin Agricultural Land Trust for work to help drought-impacted ranches install needed water-saving and conservation improvements.

• Mount Tamalpais College, a San Quentin-based college providing inmates access to associate of arts degrees and college preparatory programs. programs.

• Marin Independent Journal, in part for its support of Marin’s minority-owned businesses through the We Are One Marin program, and the nonprofit sector through the Giving Marin Community Partnership.

• John Beltran, a Marine Mammal Center volunteer who has not only helped with the center’s response and release efforts but donated his high-high-tech talents for a digital map of California’s coastline needed by rescuers.

• Andy Naja-Riese, head of the Agricultural Institute of Marin, commonly known as AIM, for the agency’s success in expanding diversity, equity and inclusion in its programs.

A highlight of each year’s events is recognition of the volunteer work of Marin youth. The long list of nominees was impressive in itself.

Kids can make a difference.

The five recipients of the Youth Volunteer of the Year Awards included:

• Alysha Lee of Novato High School, who has volunteered with the county’s Student Elections Ambassador Program. She helped design the Stop Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Hate curriculum for middle schoolers that’s now being used in 8,900 schools across the nation.

• Talia Harter, a San Rafael High School student, who has volunteered for numerous school and campus efforts, from the Marin Suicide Prevention Collaborative to Youth Transforming Justice.

• Matteo Diaz helped organize and produce the Spahr Center’s Queer Prom, a social event for LGBTQ+ teens and allies. He also has helped create models for school districts to help make their campuses safe and inclusive.

• Sophia White of Marin Catholic High School who has volunteered at the Schurig Center for Brain Injury Recovery in Larkspur since her good Marin good friend suffered a brain injury after a concussion in a soccer game. Her volunteer efforts have also included the San Francisco-Marin Food on Food Bank, Junior Giants, Rec Inc., St. Anselm Church and she has assisted in research programs at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging. Aging.

• Oliver Goldman, a reliable volunteer, and leader of the Marin County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue, having participated in dozens of search and rescue events and training, as well as achieving numerous first aid, CPR, and public safety certifications.  The event, led for the 21st time by dynamic CVNL CEO Linda Jacobs, is an inspirational reminder of the time and talent our neighbors are donating to make a difference in our community.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Marin Independent Journal in January 2023 written by Marin IJ Editorial Board. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada/Mount Tamalpais College

There are many ways to measure the disaster that is America’s prison system: the sheer, monstrous size of the captive population, the wildly disproportionate confinement of Black and brown prisoners, the recidivism rate, the prevalence of sexual assault, suicide and mental illness rates.

But the metric that has haunted me in the decade since I helped start the nonprofit The Marshall Project and began paying attention to the role of prisons in America is this: Each year more than 600,000 individuals are released from state and federal prisons. Far too many of them emerge from custody brutalized, alienated, estranged from their families, stigmatized and lacking in basic education or employable skills. Unsurprisingly, about three-quarters of those released from state prisons nationwide are arrested again within five years. California has one of the worst records for repeat offenses.

That’s why Governor Gavin Newsom’s ambitious new plan for San Quentin State Prison in California deserves national attention.

The more than 500 residents of death row — currently spared lethal injection by California’s moratorium on executions — will be transferred to other state prisons, and their housing unit, along with a prison warehouse, will be repurposed for education, job training, substance abuse therapy and other programs designed to make them safe neighbors. The prison is to be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center.

Over the past decade or so, corrections officials from several states have made pilgrimages to Europe — Norway is a favorite destination — to study a different philosophy of corrections. Obviously the United States is not Norway, a relatively homogeneous, oil-rich welfare state with an incarceration rate about one-tenth of ours. San Quentin’s roughly 3,000 inhabitants broadly match the population of all of Norway’s prisons put together. In contrast to the way most Americans understand the point of prison, to punish, to incapacitate criminals and to deter would-be offenders, progressive Europeans see a temporary loss of freedom not only as punishment for violating society’s rules but also as an opportunity that should not be wasted. Prison officers are taught that their mission is to diagnose the factors that led to criminal behavior and equip offenders to be law-abiding members of society. Prisons are more like walled campuses than cages, inmates are expected to get themselves to jobs or classrooms on schedule, and prison staff are more like social workers than sentries. Homicide and recidivism rates are remarkably low.

Several states, including Connecticut, Pennsylvania, North Dakota and Oregon, have launched experiments that borrow from European models emphasizing rehabilitation. These pilot programs have sometimes proved hard to sustain, let alone replicate, because staffing is more expensive, the original sponsors move on, budgets get cut and the innovators often encounter resistance from fear-mongering politicians and unions of corrections officers. San Quentin has proved to be fertile ground for reform.

Because the prison is embedded in affluent, liberal Marin Country, and because it has had some progressive wardens, it is rich in programs. When I visited in 2016, the prison had about 3,700 inmates and 3,000 volunteers, offering everything from Shakespeare to yoga and parenting classes to a computer coding program aimed at servicing nearby Silicon Valley. Prisoners publish an award-winning newspaper and produce an irresistible podcast called “Ear Hustle.”

Many American prisons, fearful of a political backlash if incarceration seems insufficiently punitive, offer at most some high school G.E.D. classes and manual labor training. San Quentin, attentive to the reality that upward of 90 percent of the incarcerated are eventually set free, endeavors to prepare its residents for a smooth re-entry to society. Last year its academic program became an accredited, degree-awarding junior college behind bars, Mt. Tamalpais College, the first of its kind in the country.

Mr. Newsom campaigned as a criminal justice reformer. On his watch the state has repealed some draconian sentencing policies, signed legislation banning private prisons, banned potentially lethal police chokeholds and halted executions. A successful re-engineering of San Quentin would add luster to Mr. Newsom’s progressive résumé should he, as many anticipate, make a run for the White House one day.

But he will have to navigate a narrow passage between skeptics on the punitive right and, on the left, his state’s chapter of the utopian prison abolition movement (who see any investment in prison reform as making a toxic system more palatable).

Moreover, the agency that oversees prisons, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, has not always been a brilliant steward of its domain. Under a 2011 Supreme Court order to reduce severe overcrowding, the state offloaded thousands of inmates to unprepared county jails, and many ended up in homeless encampments. Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, corrections officials sent more than 120 prisoners, some of them showing symptoms of infection, into San Quentin without adequate screening; 28 prisoners and a corrections officer died, a failure a judge called “morally indefensible and constitutionally untenable.”

So far Mr. Newsom has been vague about the details of this massive undertaking, but he has enlisted an impressive array of advisers to guide the project. I can think of 600,000 reasons to wish him success.

Bill Keller is the founding editor in chief of The Marshall Project and author of the book “What’s Prison For?” He has also been a correspondent, editor and op-ed columnist for The New York Times, and was the executive editor of The Times from July 2003 to September 2011.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in The New York Times on March 30, 2023. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada. Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.

Kwabena Bediako, campus assistant chemistry professor, was awarded the National Science Foundation, or NSF, CAREER award for his ongoing research and outreach proposal.

The CAREER award is a five-year grant open to assistant professors who are fairly early on in their careers, Bediako noted. This grant will help him and his team continue their work with structural distortions in atomically thin materials, as stated in the NSF award abstract.

“With the solids that we work with, the layers can slide over each other, so it turns out that you can also control how they are twisted to each other,” Bediako said. “Even this twisting effect — the angle that you twist them at can significantly transform how the material behaves.”

Bediako uses electron microscopes at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to observe how atoms shift in order to make arrangements more stable. This work is useful because it could inform the development of the next generation’s technologies in computing and electronic devices, the NSF abstract stated.

Applicants submit a proposal that includes information both on their research and an idea for an outreach program, which is reviewed and scored, according to Bediako. The abstract added that in this way, proposals include efforts to develop more impactful research as well as initiatives that aim to broaden participation in STEM education and scientific research.

“We proposed to begin a scientific discussions section at Mount Tamalpais College, which is the higher institution at San Quentin State Prison,” he said. “The idea with this is to have a scientific discussion section with the students who happen to be incarcerated there and discuss basic scientific principles and new scientific discoveries.”

Bediako noted that the college has an analogous program for math and that some of his students already volunteer at the San Quentin State Prison. He hopes that the program will generate excitement about the topic among students there.

During the first year of the grant, which goes into effect on April 1, Bediako plans to work with personnel at the prison and college to come up with a plan for how to implement the program. He and his team will continue their research and implement the program in the second year.

“It was encouraging to me and the rest of my group to receive this award,” Bediako said. “It provides funding for us now to carry out this research that we are very excited about and also gives us a few resources to begin the program at San Quentin we’re excited about.”

Attributions: This article originally appeared in The Daily Californian on January 23, 2023. Photo courtesy of Kwabena Bediako. The grant will support both Bediako’s ongoing research and an outreach program through Mount Tamalpais College.

San Quentin is the oldest and most notorious prison in California. It’s home to the largest death row in the nation, housing infamous criminals including Charles Manson. But Governor Gavin Newsom has a new vision for the institution, renamed the “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center”. Under his plan, the nearly 550 condemned inmates would move to other maximum security facilities in the state. With a proposed initial infusion of $20 million, San Quentin would aim to increase its rehabilitation programming 10 fold and incorporate methods used in Scandinavian countries to normalize life, emphasize support over punishment, and prepare inmates for their eventual return to society.  Forum talks about the governor’s transformative vision and the challenges in making it happen.

Guests:

Anita Chabria, columnist, Los Angeles Times

Tinisch Hollins, executive director, Californians for Safety and Justice; co-founder, SF Black Wall Street; Vice Chair, SF African-Americans Reparations Advisory Committee

(Mount Tamalpais Collge Alumni) Thanh Tran, policy associate, Ella Baker Center for Human Rights

Attributions: This article originally appeared on KQED on April 3, 2023. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada.

California’s infamous 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 is scheduled to visit the 171-year-old penitentiary Friday and detail plans to shift it from a maximum-security facility to a center for education and training within the prison system, according to his press office. In a statement Thursday, Newsom called the prison’s impending evolution “a new model for safety and justice — the California Model — that will lead the nation.”

San Quentin, which houses about 3,300 inmates, would be the largest facility of its kind in the nation, Newsom said. Located on a peninsula in Marin County north of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Quentin is California’s oldest prison and was once home to the nation’s largest Death Row. Under the governor’s plan, the facility will be renamed “San Quentin Rehabilitation Center” and an advisory group of rehabilitation and public safety experts will lead the transformation.

It was not immediately clear how long that process would take. But the reimagined facility will incorporate more holistic, Scandinavian incarceration models, according to Newsom’s administration. Any remaining Death Row inmates will be transferred to other prisons in the state. The 2023-24 budget proposal released by the governor in January allocates $20 million to commence the project. The legislature must approve funding for the effort. While it was not immediately clear the extent of changes that would occur at storied correctional facility, justice reform advocates commended the governor’s intentions.

“By transforming San Quentin into a place that promotes health and positive change, California is making a historic commitment to redefining the institution’s purpose in our society,” Brie Williams, professor of Medicine at the UCSF Center for Vulnerable Populations, said in a statement. “I look forward to lifting the voices of people who have lived or worked in prisons to imagine a center for healing trauma, repairing harm, expanding knowledge, restoring lives, and improving readiness for community return.”

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 ended the state’s use of private, for-profit prisons.

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. 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.

San Quentin was a different place when Daniel Silva was an inmate there 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 a slew of legal challenges over the years, 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. The college 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.”

Attributions: This article originally appeared in Sacramento Bee on March 17, 2023. Photo courtesy of R.J. Lozada.

W/A’s Ashley Gaddis interviews Bonaru Richarson, former editor-in-chief of the San Quentin News and member of the development team at Mount Tamalpais College, the only accredited college in the U.S. located within a prison.

Richard “Bonaru” Richardson is a communications associate on the development team at Mount Tamalpais College (Mt. Tam College), the only accredited college in the US that is located within a prison, located at San Quentin State Prison in California. A graduate of Mt. Tam, Richardson was hired for the job after serving 23 years behind bars. As many formerly incarcerated people can attest, the path from release to employment isn’t an easy one. However, Richardson had a few resources that many others are left without—a support system and training. Both of these elements were introduced to Richardson during his work on the San Quentin News, a newspaper run by incarcerated people at San Quentin, where he cultivated a variety of highly valuable workplace skills and took on leadership responsibilities as the paper’s editor-in-chief. 

In a recent conversation about the impact that his experience leading the San Quentin News had on his personal growth, Richardson draws on his own experiences with incarceration and reentry, offering insights into educational and work-based programs that can help improve outcomes for returning citizens upon their release. 

Ashley Gaddis: Bonaru, how did you become interested in working on the San Quentin News?

Bonaru Richardson: I was heavily inundated with the gang environment before and during my time in prison. My future was based on what happened the next day and not much further so I never indulged in the possibility of other opportunities. When I hit the level four yard (maximum security in California prisons) that’s when it dawned on me that I need to start changing my life because I started seeing real gang members who were really lost and given up hope in life—and I didn’t see myself giving up hope to the point where I didn’t want my life anymore. I started thinking about my children. My kids were around five, six, and 7 years old at the time and they started asking questions that I couldn’t answer. I wanted to be there for them. 

That’s what got me started with education—when one of the instructors told me I should go to the vocational program. They were thinking about my reentry before I even had a vision of what reentry might look like.

I knew that if I ever had the opportunity to be released from prison, I didn’t want to go back into society the way that I’d been released previously. I didn’t have transferable skills back then and didn’t care to learn any skills. I knew this time I had to be a little bit more responsible so I started looking into my options and the vocational program was one that I thought I could fall back on. 

AG: Tell me about your work on The San Quentin News and how you got started working on the paper.

BR: The San Quentin News was just coming back into existence in 2008, and I was in a vocational training class printing the newspapers at that time. I was the only person printing the paper at that time, so I had to take on a leadership role with the guys who put the newspaper together—writing it and learning to be responsible enough to get the newspaper printed on time.

My first role was as the traffic manager. I was delivering the newspapers from one unit to the next. I eventually ended up cleaning toilets every morning, making the coffee, and getting everybody’s desks and things ready for when they came into the newsrooms early in the morning. We were usually the first ones there and the last ones to leave. And oddly enough, that behavior stuck with me all the way through the time I became editor-in-chief. In that role, I wanted to teach people some responsibility. I wanted to make sure that anybody who wanted to come work on a newspaper had a GED—you basically can’t work in America without one. So I pushed them to learn on the job and go get a GED and then I pushed them to get into the college program.

AG: What kind of skills did you develop in the newsroom?

In terms of transferable skills, working in the newsroom gave me more than you can possibly imagine. I learned how to utilize Adobe Creative Suite, everything in there from Photoshop to Illustrator to InDesign. All of these skills culminated into something that I wish I would’ve had before I thought about going down the wrong path.

When I was on the newspaper staff, I used to look up to Arnulfo Garcia (former San Quentin News editor-in-chief),  Michael Harris (co-founder of Death Row Records and former San Quentin News editor-in-chief), and Aly Tamboura (now Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Anti-Recidivism Coalition). I appreciated them and the way that they commanded a room and the way that they were always responsible for their duties. As I watched them, I started taking down those antisocial bricks I had built up. These little nuances that people might take for granted taught me the things that I should have learned at an early age. I probably would not have ended up in prison had I known them earlier but it was a recovering addict (referring to Garcia) who taught me responsibilities—imagine that. Arnulfo Garica was a real man and father, not just a recovering addict. 

AG: Describe some of the most significant challenges that people face once they’re released.

BR:  First and foremost, before they even get released, they have to have it in their mind already that they want to change and they want to be productive in society—that has to start while you are in prison. It’s preparation. A lot of individuals know they will be released and they don’t think ahead. They’re gonna smoke weed, and drink white lightning (alcohol made in prisons) until the day they go home. The way it’s set up, people aren’t taught to be responsible while they’re incarcerated. You have room and board, you’re fed and clothed, and then you’re pushed into life with $200, told to enjoy the rest of your life, and don’t come back, or you’ll be back. That’s usually the standard message. 

A lot of people are going to take that $200 and go get alcohol, drugs, or whatever else. So that’s why I say that it starts before you even get out of prison. To be successful in reentry, the mind is what has to change first, then your attitude. It’s a mental struggle for a lot of individuals, but once they figure it out, then they’re ready to give back, make amends and be willing to ask for real help.

AG: What about your experience at San Quentin do you feel set you up for success upon release? What should other institutions think about?

BR: The carceral system is broken in so many ways that it’s hard even to say where to start. But these institutions can be transformed into proper management facilities. If it wasn’t for the administration at San Quentin, I don’t think I would’ve changed. I had been in 10, maybe 15 prisons. San Quentin worked because the administration allowed programs like Mount Tamalpais College and San Quentin News. The administrations also talk to you, while others put punishment on top of punishment despite the promise of rehabilitation suggested by the name CDCR (California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation).

If you’re going to invest in anything, it should be people. Invest in making sure that the survivors are healed, and incarcerated individuals understand their role in the harm they caused to society. Just because people are in prison, it doesn’t mean that they don’t have the potential for growth and change. People need a support system in those institutions that can talk to individuals about what they can expect when they leave prison. It’s the fundamental things in life that people need to understand so they can take steps like filling out a job application, saving money, and paying bills. And when they can do that, they start getting a sense of pride. I can pay my taxes. I can vote. Because of those things I began to think “maybe I’m a part of this society.” 

Attribution: This article originally appeared in Whiteboard Advisors, in November 2022. Photo courtesy of Whiteboard Advisors.

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.