Published Works

PJP’s San Quentin Correspondent Joe Garcia talked to us about his recent feature covering the first in-person graduation of students from Mount Tamalpais College in three years. MTC is the nation’s only independent and fully accredited college program that operates exclusively in a prison. While a recent relaxing of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (CDCR) COVID-19 policy allowed the event to happen, persistent infection in various blocks complicated the celebration. Garcia’s piece explored the accomplishment of his peers alongside the heavyweight that COVID-19 restrictions continue to bear upon life for incarcerated Americans. Read our interview below to learn more about how this story came to life and the changing protocol inside the California prison system.

PJP: When did you realize there was a story here that PJP readers should read?

JG: I had a feeling the Mount Tamalpais graduation would be a good story because it was a huge deal to get everybody there in person. Because of the COVID-19 shutdowns, there hadn’t been an in-person graduation for the last couple of years. And, it was a big deal because one building was still on quarantine. The event wouldn’t have been allowed if the CDCR hadn’t updated their policies. At least a third of the graduates who were supposed to walk in their caps and gowns lived in that quarantined building. So there was this whole issue: Would they be excluded? Would CDCR figure out a way for them to test and get cleared quickly? Especially because their outside family members had been invited months ago to come to San Quentin and attend the event.

PJP: What was your process in writing this story?

JG: My process with any story is to take as many notes as possible. So often there are things that come up when writing, and I would wish I had paid attention to the clothes people were wearing or written down numbers, like how many people were present.

PJP: Can you say a little more about the emotional atmosphere of the ceremony?

JG: The emotions at the event were mixed. People are frustrated in general, with COVID-19 and the quarantines and the shutdowns. People are beaten down by the endless loss of programming. People have lost the opportunity to do the things that had been done at San Quentin for decades, so there was that subdued nature to it. But then also, there’s this inspirational, uplifting feeling of emancipation when these events actually happen. It’s like, wow, finally, this is what we’re supposed to be doing if COVID-19 wasn’t in the way. And because so many of these events are in the San Quentin chapel, there’s an extra layer of reverence, to some degree.

PJP: What was it like interviewing the families of the graduates? Were people eager to talk about the graduation?

JG: That was actually the best part of the whole thing: interviewing the family of graduates. Darryl Farris’s mom, at 90 years old, was just so vital and alive. It was amazing that she was able to attend.

PJP: How many other people incarcerated in SQ were able to attend the ceremony?

JG: Because of the quarantine, it wasn’t really billed as open for all residents. Under normal times, CDCR would have made sure that everybody who was supposed to be there was there and then they would just open the doors for anybody else who wanted to attend. But this time, there were only around 20 or 30 incarcerated guests. And then there were probably about 30 outside attendees.

PJP: What was its impact for those who were not able to attend or were not part of the festivities? Do you see this as a motivating event for others considering pursuing an education while incarcerated?

JG: It should have been a motivating event. It was in one sense, because they allowed it to happen and because it means so much to the whole community. But then the whole community couldn’t really partake in it, so that was negative. There was another negative aspect too because a lot of people were really upset that the staff allowed guys from the North Block to test and go to the chapel and hang out with their families. Other guys in North Block who weren’t graduates weren’t allowed to test and visit with their families because, when a building is on quarantine, all their visits are canceled. And then, on top of that, there was the general feeling that these quarantines were so arbitrary and stifling and nonsensical because no one was really sick.

Read more of Joe Garcia’s stories here, and stay tuned for his newest report on San Quentin’s COVID-19 policy.

As a kid, I didn’t see the value of education. My mother sent my brother and me to Catholic school as a path out of our dangerous Brooklyn neighborhood, but I saw it as the place where bullies lay in wait for us kids wearing plaid uniform ties. I got good grades until high school, when I made fighting bullies my priority. The altercations escalated, leading me to transfer to different New York City schools before finishing in Detroit. I did not attend the graduation ceremony because my classmates were strangers.

When it came time to apply for college, I didn’t bother. My grades did not match my brains, and I lacked athleticism, so a scholarship was not happening. Plus, I did not know what I wanted to be. Without rich parents to foot the bill, going into student debt to find myself was out of the question. I needed an immediate income to get out of Brownsville, Brooklyn.

College did not seem like the answer for me, but I remember attending my mother’s graduation. This single Black woman had earned her bachelor’s degree in sociology, but that piece of paper did not translate into a six-figure income or a house in the suburbs. I didn’t realize that more funding went to filling prisons than sociological studies about the root causes of crime. I certainly didn’t expect to earn a double-life sentence for murder, or to graduate from college at San Quentin State Prison during a global pandemic.

Behind bars, I found a passion for writing that turned into a drive for education. However, I couldn’t follow that drive for over a decade. During my first 10 years of imprisonment, I was housed in prisons that mainly offered correspondence college courses. The books were often expensive, and they were not covered by financial aid or the schools. I made 19 cents an hour as a teacher’s assistant and a clerical worker, and had to spend my outside resources on food to supplement the small and often inedible meals the prison served.

In 2013, my security classification dropped to Level Two, and I was transferred to San Quentin, which has a college right on the grounds and free books, even for the correspondence courses available from two California community colleges. I added my name to the waiting list for Patten University’s Prison University Project, and in the meantime, I took courses with Coastline and Feather River community colleges.

Finally, in 2015, I was able to start at Patten. I dove into every writing course they had. Lessons I learned in English 101, Creative Writing and other classes advanced my skills and led to me writing for dozens of publications.

By January of 2020, I was one history course away from earning my associate’s degree. I worked hard, but in March, just as our finals were due, Patten staff stopped coming into the prison because of the COVID-19 epidemic. About a week later, the whole prison went on an indefinite lockdown. I sat in my cell wondering if I would survive this new, super-contagious virus.

I found that out in June 2020, when I contracted COVID-19. It gave me a headache, body aches, weakness and congestion that lasted for 10 days. Others fared worse — they had hospital trips and respirators. Twenty-nine people died at San Quentin, including a beloved sergeant. The deadliness of the virus underscored the need for continuing the lockdown — and it delayed my graduation.

Finally, in October 2020, I received a notice from Patten, which by then had become Mount Tamalpais College (MTC), the nation’s first independently operated and fully accredited prison liberal arts institution. We would finish the history class via correspondence. Using my top bunk as a desk, I completed the required work two months earlier than the December deadline. I waited for confirmation that I passed, but didn’t hear anything for more than six months.

When prison programming finally resumed in September 2021, I was able to talk to the MTC coordinators. I learned that my work had been lost, but then found. I passed my class and earned my associate’s degree, but I would have to wait for the graduation ceremony to hold my diploma in my hands.

The pages of the calendar turned to 2022, but there was still no graduation or diploma. Then, in April, MTC notified me that we would have the ceremony at the prison on June 24, and I could invite three visitors. I had skipped my graduation from Southeastern High School in Detroit because I started there mid-quarter senior year and did not feel a connection to the class. Plus, my family back in New York was too far away to attend. While I couldn’t invite my relatives to my college graduation because COVID-19 made prison lockdowns too common and unpredictable, I looked forward to celebrating with some of the men with whom I’d survived a murderous virus. Plus, Susan and Mandy, two dear friends who live in nearby Oakland, agreed to come.

Two months before the ceremony, San Quentin began its second quarantine lockdown of the year. The lockdown was lifted in time for our graduation, but my hopes were once again dashed when someone in my cell block tested positive. That meant more quarantine.

Luckily, three days before graduation, MTC notified us that graduates from our block could attend the ceremony. All each of us had to do was test negative for COVID-19.

At 7:45 a.m. on Friday, June 24, 2022, about 10 of us soon-to-be graduates were called for a rapid COVID-19 test. We lined up before a nurse, knowing that if any of us tested positive, our big day would end with quarantine in the administrative segregation building — the hole. To add insult to injury, the ad-seg building faces the chapel where the ceremony was being held. That meant we’d be watching guests attend the graduation through a bar-covered window.

Each person stuck a cotton swab up their nostrils and handed it to a nurse who tested the sample. I was about fifth in line and kept peeking at the box of test tubes. After I tested negative, I paced the flats — what we call the ground floor of the block.

At 8:30 we heard an encouraging announcement: “College graduates, report to the Mack Shack.” Gathering at this small CO station meant the ceremony was on! Our next stop was Chapel A to put on our black caps and gowns. At 9:30 we walked into Chapel B to the applause of fellow incarcerated people, prison staff, teachers, formerly incarcerated guests and our visitors.

Seeing my formerly incarcerated friends and visitors lifted my spirits. It was the first in-person visit I’d had in months, and it felt like a family reunion. And the ceremony, which included the graduating classes of 2020, 2021 and 2022, did not disappoint. Warden Ron Broomfield gave a surprising speech about George Washington Carver’s path to education. Then Tommy “Shakur” Ross, the former co-host of the “Uncuffed” podcast, who had just been released two months prior, appeared wearing a sharp black leather jacket and a matching ankle monitor. Ross, also the 2019 valedictorian, spoke to us about the challenges of being on a strict parole, the power of human connections — and his trips to a Giants baseball game and the first International Prison Radio conference in Norway.

Our valedictorian was John Levin, a 5-foot-4, bespectacled man in his late 50s. “I lost my speech, but have no fear. I wrote a speech for every occasion as a high school student,” he said, leafing through papers in a tan folder. “Let’s see, here’s the one about being the MVP of the NBA finals. Oh, here’s the one about winning a Nobel Peace Prize.”

As the crowd laughed with him, he found his speech about graduating from college while in prison. Things turned serious, bringing people to the brink of tears.

Then, finally, each graduate took the stage one-by-one to receive a piece of parchment rolled up tight with an official silver seal. Inside was an IOU note instead of an actual diploma, but my feelings of pride, joy and love were real. Watching my friends turn up in the small crowd, I smiled, grateful to be able to share the moment with people I love despite the prolonged violence of COVID-19.

Attribution: This article was first printed in The Marshall Project on September 2, 2022

I am one of nearly 3,000 people in San Quentin State Prison who are paying for past mistakes. Most of us want to do the right thing so that we can earn parole or clemency and get back to our families and Communities.

My “right thing” is journalism. Every day I walk the yard listening to the struggles and triumphs of fellow prisoners, gathering material to tell our story. My goal is to answer: So what?

More than 26 years behind walls have shown me that free people aren’t really paying attention to what’s happening in our society’s prisons and jails. Journalists, especially those on the inside, have a duty to show what is going on and why it matters. To answer the “so what.” Here are some reasons you should care about what my reporting shows.

California taxpayers are doling out roughly $100,000 a year to incarcerate each prisoner. A disproportionate number of the more than 40,000 people serving life sentences in California prisons are elderly, one reason our state has the highest prisoner healthcare spending in the Nation.

The annual incarceration cost in the U.S. exceeds $80 billion.

About half of us here in San Quentin, me included, are serving a life sentence — and yet well over 90% of incarcerated people will eventually get out. So what’s happening behind these walls is rippling into the outside world. That means rehabilitation programs inside prison make a difference to everyone outside prison as well. 

Right now, San Quentin is so overcrowded that COVID-19, for the third time, has forced this prison into quarantine and stymied rehabilitative services. That’s a loss for everyone, because these services work. 

One effort in California aims to address the drug abuse crisis inside prisons. 

In 2020, the state began implementing the largest medication-assisted drug treatment program in the country. While official mortality data for 2020 is still pending, preliminary information shows a decrease in overdose deaths. Mortality data is just one early indicator: The largest payoff for society ought to come when incarcerated individuals who had a drug problem are released — not as active addicts back on the street, but as individuals who are in recovery and have tools to avoid using.

I’ve also reported on the availability of rehabilitative services that transformed the destructive nature of people, once out of touch with their communities, to people who’ve become accountable, empathetic and compassionate. Guiding Rage Into Power is a 52-week introspective program aimed at teaching its participants nonviolence, emotional intelligence, mindfulness and victim impact. Hundreds of prisoners completed the program. GRIP’s data shows that  just one of nearly 1,000  has returned to prison. 

These kinds of programs matter to society as a whole, but they operate inside a black box. Only incarcerated journalists are in a position to observe the interventions up close and to speak with affected individuals. Unfortunately, we operate at an extreme disadvantage.

There is no privacy and no access to the internet. I use a typewriter and pen to send my stories to publications. Sometimes I feel the pressure that I may offend powerful interests. As an example, since contradicting the official report regarding the 2015 Legionnaires’ disease outbreak at San Quentin, I’ve been persona non grata to some prison officials. 

No wonder professional journalism about prisons and jails from an incarcerated voice is rare. 

Since 2009, I’ve been writing about what happens on my side of the wall. I’m now the senior editor for San Quentin News and a contributor to Solitary Watch, a nonprofit watchdog group. 

When I report that a rehabilitation program is promising, there’s not likely to be much pushback. On the other hand, my piece “How Not to Fight a Prison Pandemic” continues a series of articles about the cruelty that prison officials inflict on the incarcerated population. Prison officials aren’t pleased — but the work is important. 

Most of the time, it feels like I’m walking a tightrope. I’m always being yelled at and also praised. Still, I’m compelled to pick up my pen, because our walled- off voices need to be heard. How else can Americans learn what’s working and what’s broken inside the prison system? It’s up to incarcerated journalists to inform those conversations.

Juan Moreno Haines is senior editor of the San Quentin News and a contributing writer at Solitary Watch

Attribution: This article was first printed in Los Angeles Times July 8, 2022

For five years, I got up at 2 every morning and labored in the San Quentin State Prison kitchen, stirring kettles, scraping grills and scrubbing countertops and floors — covering myself in kitchen slime — just to get a five-minute shower.

I learned to keep a job if I wanted a daily shower. But hundreds of prisoners who live near me are unable to shower daily, despite the fact that outbreaks of diseases such as COVID-19 and norovirus and infestations of bedbugs and scabies are common.

The use of water as a weapon over prisoners by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation violates basic human decency and endangers health — especially during a deadly pandemic.

The department already conserves with toilets that flush only twice every hour; water fountains are turned off and water bottles are outlawed. Our water automatically cuts off while we shave and brush our teeth. Sinks in our cells are too small and impractical for cleaning our whole bodies. Prison laundry services also are limited. 

Prisoners should not be forced to work in order to get a shower. The California task force to study reparations proposals for African Americans recommends that involuntary servitude be abolished in California prisons. Its report, released in June, recommends repealing Penal Code Section 2700, which “shall require of every able-bodied prisoner imprisoned in any state prison as many hours of faithful labor in each day and every day during his or her term of imprisonment as shall be prescribed by the rules and regulations of the director of Corrections.”

It also recommends paying any person incarcerated in a California prison or jail a fair market rate for their labor. Prisoners in California are paid as little as eight cents an hour for their work. Assembly Constitutional Amendment 3 would have changed that, but it failed in the state Senate last week. State Sen. Sydney Kamlager, the amendment’s author, vowed to bring it back for reconsideration this week in an effort to place it on the November statewide ballot. 

 Many of us have wondered whether it would affect what little access we have to water for personal cleanliness in our overcrowded prisons.

Prisoners who don’t have jobs — including those pursuing GEDs or college degrees — are allowed a five-minute shower on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. To shower every day, you have to work to help maintain the prison or its industries. 

Yet every day, most prisoners run up and down basketball courts, jog around the track, slide into home plate, or participate in other activities in the prison yard. Hundreds of men, soaked in sweat, return to their cramped cells and cannot shower. The San Quentin cells are reminiscent of slave quarters in the bowels of a ship. As of June 22, California’s prison population was 97,201 — more prisoners by a third than the 35 state prisons were designed to accommodate. California needs to make every effort to reduce the population of its overcrowded prisons.

We hear the jangling of keys as officers lock the doors of our double-occupied cells. Once inside, we sit amid the stench of musty flesh, athlete’s foot and moldy laundry. We breathe in stale air stinking of dirty mops.

If we shower or even “bird bath” without permission, we can lose privileges, see our prison stay extended or have parole denied. These inhumane and manipulative tactics parallel those used in the cotton fields of Southern plantations during slavery.

California is currently in a severe drought, but rather than prevent nonworkers from showering, the department should fix the broken water mains throughout the prisons, the hundreds of faucets leaking inside of the cells and the showers that drip throughout the night.

Labor exploitation in California prisons will be exacerbated by drought conditions unless the department is forced to stop withholding daily showers from prisoners in an effort to increase their labor. The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation should allow every prisoner a five-minute shower every day, regardless of whether they work, to prevent the spread of disease in overcrowded facilities.

Attribution: This article was first printed in Cal Matters June 28, 2022

This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on October 9, 2021. Read story.

On June 27, 2020, a guard came to my cell at San Quentin’s North Block to tell me that I tested positive for the coronavirus. Later that day, I was ordered to pack up my belongings and herded to South Block along with 62 other infected prisoners — part of a scramble that one infectious disease expert would later describe as “reckless.” The virus spared my life, but killed 28 prisoners and a beloved correctional sergeant. A court would later call it “the worst epidemiological disaster in the history of California corrections.”

As the disease spread throughout the prison, more than 300 San Quentin residents filed a lawsuit asserting that the state’s mishandling of the virus violates their Eighth Amendment protection against cruel and unusual punishment. The case is making its way to the California Supreme Court.

I am one of the plaintiffs.

On May 30, 2020, John Dean Mattox, 63, was put on a bus at California Institute for Men, commonly known as Chino, for an 11-hour ride to San Quentin. Before boarding the bus, he told Chino prison officials that he had COVID-19 symptoms.

I’m a reporter with San Quentin News, a newspaper produced by incarcerated journalists inside the prison. Shortly after Mattox got to San Quentin, he told me in an interview that Chino officials said, “Tell it to medical when you get there.”

Court papers and independent reports show that some of the 122 prisoners on the Chino buses, Mattox among them, were already infected. In later court testimony, Mattox would recall that passengers were tired, but couldn’t sleep with masks on, so some pulled them down. Several were coughing. When they reached San Quentin, Mattox said they weren’t screened for COVID-19. Nevertheless, he informed medical staff that he had COVID-19 symptoms. Two days later, a nurse tested him. After the results came back, she told Mattox that he was “the first inmate to have the disease of COVID” at San Quentin.

A couple of weeks later, infectious disease experts from UCSF toured San Quentin. The experts wrote an “urgent memo” explaining that San Quentin is “an extremely dangerous place for an outbreak” and urged, “everything should be done to decrease the number of people exposed to this environment as quickly as possible.”

The team recommended that prison officials halve its prisoner population “to allow every cell in North and West Blocks to be single-room occupancy” and to allow leadership at San Quentin to prioritize which units to depopulate further, “including the high-risk reception center (South Block) and gymnasium environments.”

North Block (414 cells) and West Block (449 cells) were identified as the most vulnerable to contagion. They are enclosed and unventilated buildings with outer windows welded shut. Each block has five tiers of windowless cells that are roughly 4-feet wide and 10-feet long — smaller than the average parking space. The cells are furnished with a stainless-steel sink and toilet. Each cell has bunk beds to accommodate two people.

There are bars on the cell front doors, allowing air to circulate freely from one cell to the next.

In October 2020, a California Appeals Court declared that “in the face of this pandemic, which appears to take its greatest toll among older individuals and in congregate living situations, and in an aged facility with all the ventilation, space, and sanitation problems referenced in the Urgent Memo, (prison officials’) failure to immediately adopt and implement measures designed to eliminate double celling, dormitory style housing and other measures to permit physical distancing between inmates is morally indefensible and constitutionally untenable.”

The prisoners were not the only ones endangered.

In February, Cal/OSHA, the state body that regulates occupational safety and health, fined San Quentin $421,880 for “willful” violations of worker protection. “San Quentin staff were not provided adequate training or equipment for working with COVID-19 infected individuals, and employees who had been exposed to COVID-19 positive inmates were not provided proper medical services, including testing, contact tracing and referrals to physicians or other licensed health care professionals.”

The family of Sgt. Gilbert Polanco, who died from COVID-19, filed a lawsuit against the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. News reports said that although he suffered from diabetes, leaving him vulnerable to COVID-19, as a duty bound public employee, he continued to work — even double shifts.

Marin County Superior Court Judge Geoffrey M. Howard was appointed to oversee a reduction of the prisoner population, but during a Nov. 30, 2020, preliminary hearing, prison officials said that they “did not intend to comply” with a reduction order.

The Corrections Department has a combative history with the courts. It took nearly 20 years of litigation before U.S. Supreme Court, in its 2011 ruling in Brown v. Plata, ordered the state to reduce overcrowding, saying that it had grown so severe that one prisoner a week was dying of treatable conditions. More than a decade later, the department remains under receivership because it cannot maintain the population level set by the U.S. Supreme Court, which is a generous 137.5% of designed capacity.

Almost a year from the date of the UCSF experts’ urgent memo, an evidentiary hearing was held to give the California Supreme Court relevant facts to make a final ruling.

I watched as masked Judge Howard was Zoomed into San Quentin’s Protestant chapel. Dozens of the more than 300 prisoner plaintiffs sat alongside with me to watch 11 days of testimony from their fellow prisoners, medical and mental health experts as well as prison officials, including the acting warden, Ronald Broomfield, who Gov. Gavin Newsom has since officially appointed warden.

Broomfield told the court that he could not have refused the transfer of prisoners from Chino to San Quentin. He said that he had concerns about receiving prisoners from “an outbreak institution,” but he testified that he “had no knowledge that prisoners were exposed to someone with confirmed cases of COVID-19.” He acknowledged that the transfers from Chino were not immediately tested upon arrival.

Officials say that since the outbreak is over, and San Quentin is getting vaccinated (87% of prisoners and 60% of staff as of September), there is no need to reduce the population.

The department also says it is prepared for future outbreaks thanks to its “Surge Mitigation and Management Plan,” which includes putting tents on San Quentin grounds as well as opening up its churches and furniture factory for additional bed space that would allow more social distancing. The plan increases testing and contact tracing procedures. It calls for isolating coronavirus-infected prisoners in cells with solid doors and provides an unlimited supply of N-95 masks and surgical face coverings for every prisoner and guard.

This plan may soon be put to the test.

Since the evidentiary hearing, six people tested positive for the coronavirus in San Quentin, and there have been outbreaks of two unrelated but miserable infections, norovirus and cryptosporidium, according to memos issued by the San Quentin medical department and hearing testimony.

The prison responded by reinstating the lockdown imposed in the spring of 2020. Most prisoners were allowed out of their cells only every other day, one tier at a time, for 90 minutes with an option to shower in one of the racially segregated community showers, and/or go to the prison yard, and/or make a 15-minute telephone call.

Under normal conditions, prisoners may spend the majority of the day outside of their cells. Cell doors first open at 6 a.m. and don’t permanently close for the night until 8:30 p.m. During open times, prisoners make their way around the prison to educational, substance abuse and support service jobs as well as the yard for recreation. Telephones are available from 7 a.m. through 8:30 p.m.

Prisoners were kept in lockdown for 14 days.

Inspector General reports and testimony by prison officials show that the Corrections Department and its medical staff knew San Quentin conditions were dangerous before the COVID-19 outbreak. Prison officials ignored their own guidelines, which would have required a negative test before the transfer, and testing and quarantining of the transferred prisoners when they arrived at San Quentin.

Dr. Meghan Morris, an expert in infectious disease epidemiology, testified in court proceedings that the pandemic was “a textbook outbreak that can be traced back to a single event, which is the transfer of individuals from CIM without testing, quick testing, and appropriate isolation and quarantining.” She deemed the state of affairs “reckless.”

One of the men watching the video of the hearing in San Quentin’s chapel was Andrew Lee Hildreth, 38. He was among those transferred in from Chino and contracted COVID-19 sometime along the way. Hildreth told me he felt an unexpected level of “comfort and closure.” He found the testimony of witnesses defending the Corrections Department’s actions “so lacking in compassion” that the net effect was “just about a direct admission of guilt.”

I admit I felt similarly. Even as a journalist, trying to remain objective as I reported what I saw in San Quentin, it was not hard to become emotional. Writing about people I knew who died from the virus — particularly well-liked men like Michael Hampton and John Stevens — was devastating. I was at Mike’s wedding and every time I went to church, he was there to give me a big hug.

Sgt. Polanco’s death, too, affected me. He just isn’t missed by his co-workers, but also by some of the men in blue, who he counseled, gave support during rehabilitative programs and debated sports trivia with.

COVID-19 admittedly presented unprecedented challenges to preserving health and safety inside San Quentin. But after reporting on the spread of the disease, and suffering from COVID-19 myself, it’s impossible not to feel these losses were needless and born of a failure to grasp the deadly consequences of merging mass incarceration with COVID-19.

The Marin County Public Defender’s office called me to testify about the conditions in North Block. On cross-examination, the Corrections Department’s lawyer asked me if I thought things at San Quentin were better. The record doesn’t reflect all of what I wanted to say: “I’m in 3 feet under water and I’m drowning. Then, you let me up 2 feet to say things are better. No! I’m still drowning. I’m drowning because of overcrowding.”

Many of us inside San Quentin are doubtful that significant change is coming, but at least the hearings in our case amount to a dose of public accountability.

San Quentin’s population, which fell slightly in the COVID spring of 2020, has begun to grow again as buses continue to arrive.

Juan Moreno Haines is an incarcerated journalist who has been a member of the Society of Professional Journalists since 2015. In 2020, the California News Publishers Association awarded him a first-place prize for coverage of the pandemic fallout. This story is supported by the PEN America Writing for Justice Fellowship.

This article was originally published in the Boston Globe on August 15, 2021. Read story.

Remorse. I killed a man and critically wounded another in broad daylight over a duffel bag of marijuana and to protect a friend, and I didn’t feel remorse.

Webster’s defines remorse as “a torturing sense of guilt for one’s actions,” which I took to mean actions that were wrong. I felt like what I did was a right of survival, so why should I feel remorse?

Even after being arrested, found guilty of second-degree murder, and sentenced to 55 years to life 21 years ago, when I was 29, I didn’t feel remorse. I felt stupid. Stupid for getting caught. Stupid for valuing my thug ego over my freedom so I could raise my sons. Stupid for being willing to spend more on lawyers than the value of the weed the armed guys I shot tried to steal. Stupid for not having enough money saved up to hire the right legal team.

In prison, I aged out of a criminal mentality by the time I was 40, but I still hadn’t developed empathy for the men I left lying in pools of their own blood. I othered all of them as bullies and thugs who had it coming. A million years in prison wasn’t going to change that. Prison is for punishment, not addressing childhood trauma.

I lost my empathy growing up in the segregated Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The neighborhood, a collection of 21 housing projects, was 78 percent Black and 21 percent Puerto Rican. It felt like anybody — cop, neighbor, or stranger — could kill you and the system wouldn’t do anything about it.

I lived in this environment with a complexion so light, people called me “White Boy.” There was malice in the way they said it. But I was just a kid, and like any kid anywhere, I rode skateboards, collected Marvel comics, played video games, Dungeons & Dragons, and baseball, and watched “Star Trek.” I kept getting beat up and robbed, and the police never solved any of the crimes.

When I was 17 years old, a local teen shot my 14-year-old brother while I ran. Six months later, that teen stood on a corner, waving the same gun at me. That night, I stopped collecting comic books, went to a kid who sold drugs, and borrowed a gun. It was for future protection, for revenge and respect, and for my ego.

I did skid bids — short stints in jail for violent offenses — in New York until a court in Los Angeles sentenced me to life. I spent the first 13 years in prison blaming my victims, the courts, and the police for my choices. Because I’d been robbed by two armed men and had shot them in self-defense, I justified the homicide. I ignored the fact that I fled the scene, refused to snitch, and left a man to die and the police to clean up my mess. In court, I ignored the prosecution’s argument that life is more important than property, even though the property was a duffel bag of contraband.

My mindset and whole life changed once I reached San Quentin State Prison, which allows volunteers — there are approximately 3,000 — from outside prison to come in and work side by side with incarcerated men like me. They facilitate programs, like the San Quentin Newspaper, the “Ear Hustle” podcast, “First Watch” video team, college classes, yoga, computer coding, self-help, arts, and more. In one of the programs, I met a Black mother who reached my heart and changed it forever.

A violence-prevention self-help group named Guiding Rage Into Power invited Ayoola in as a guest speaker. She told us about a son of herswho was shot as he sat in a car. He lived, but nightmares haunted him. A year later, her other son was murdered. She spoke with a quiet dignity, tears rolling down her face. Seeing her pain in person, I sobbed and felt remorse for the first time.

Prior to that epiphany, violence had seemed to me like a video game. I had fired some shots, men fell down, and I ran off without ever seeing their blood, or the paramedic trying to save them, or the police telling another mother her son is dead. Seeing the consequences of actions like mine in the person of a still-grieving mother was harder for me than awaiting the jury’s verdict or serving life in prison.

Hearing Ayoola’s story awoke my empathy. I will never hurt another human being again.

Rahsaan Thomas, who is incarcerated in California’s San Quentin prison, is the co-host and co-producer of the Pulitzer Prize-nominated and DuPont Award-winning podcast “Ear Hustle,” as well as a contributing writer for The Marshall Project, Current, and San Quentin News.