Current Affairs

Even in a Pandemic, San Quentin Must Restore Rehabilitation Programs

December 14, 2020 by Mt. Tam College

With COVID-19 running amok in lockups across the state, California’s prison population at San Quentin State Prison is suffering a double blow. As of Oct. 20, there were more than 2,200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 among its residents and 28 deaths.

Not only must the other residents live in fear of getting sick, their minds are being starved by lack of stimulation. A state of emergency has virtually confined them to their cells like penned cattle. And with the holidays fast approaching, the level of anxiety might be further heightened with the exclusion of the customary observances that have been a programming hallmark at San Quentin State Prison for decades. This lack of exposure to rehabilitative programming deprives them of the resources that would prepare them for their return to society.

When I was first incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison in the fall of 2016, it was a hub of rehabilitation. The Prison University Project provided an avenue for me to improve myself academically. Criminal Gangs Anonymous and Millati Islami, an Islamic 12-step program, offered peer-to-peer support and recovery-based studies on the underlying causes of substance abuse, recidivism and criminality.

At my parole suitability hearing, the panel members from the Board of Parole Hearings remarked that it was my participation in rehabilitative programming that guided their decision to find me suitable for parole. They reasoned that it would be one thing to be able to enjoy the fruits of scholarship by securing a well-paying job, and another to have those gains go up in smoke in the form of vaporized rocks ingested through a crack pipe.

During the coronavirus outbreak at San Quentin State Prison, social isolation protocols were implemented and rehabilitative programming was suspended in response to the coronavirus. While those measures seemed justified, it has been nearly eight months since all rehabilitative programming was discontinued, and it looks as if no attempts are being made to address the programming needs of San Quentin State Prison’s rehabilitation-starved residents.

The indefinite suspension of rehabilitative programming runs counter to the mission of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Since 2004, the CDCR has invoked rehabilitative programming as an essential function of its operations, along with corrections officers, civilian support personnel and medical staff. None of these other components faced indefinite suspension, and neither should rehabilitative programming.

Restoring programming could be done safely. One approach would be to install more kiosks in the housing units, like the kiosks that are currently available for legal research. Secure media platforms such as kiosks, electronic tablets, e-readers and correspondence coursework would give prison officials enough latitude to continue rehabilitative programming activities that will meet the needs of the residents, as well as address any security concerns during the pandemic. But the use of these media seems to have been overlooked or dismissed.

The installation of additional kiosks might be costly, and not everyone can afford an electronic tablet or e-reader. The staff needed to maintain security and provide technical support might also strain resources. In addition to that, I am certain there are those who might say: “These people got themselves into prison, so why waste precious resources when society is being equally challenged by the pandemic?” But the suspension of rehabilitative resources could prove more costly than folks might imagine.

Take the case of an incarcerated individual who suffers from the disease of addiction and receives no in-prison substance abuse treatment. CDCR recidivism tracking data, from 2014 to 2017, shows that of those who did not receive in-prison treatment 47.8% were convicted within three years of being released. By comparison, of those who completed both in-prison treatment and aftercare 18.5% were convicted within three years of being released. According to California’s Legislative Analyst Office, in 2018-2019, it costs about $81,000 per year to incarcerate someone in prison in California. The data speaks for itself: rehabilitative programming works and is less costly. It also shows the antiquated approach — which proposes we leave those who fell from grace to their own devices — does not work and is more costly.

Rehabilitative programming was my key to freedom. And rehabilitative programming continues to play a pivotal role in my recovery. Moreover, in my case, it is because of rehabilitative programming that society has thus far gained the benefit of having another citizen that can contribute to the well-being of all of its citizens.

Pandemic notwithstanding, rehabilitative programming should be reinstated and California’s authorities need to step up to the plate to see to it that my comrades have a decent shot at returning to their communities better off than when they suffered what can arguably be construed as one of the worst moments of their lives. That is what the CDCR declared in its mission statement and this is what the public should expect.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle on December 14, 2020. Read Story

October 14: Update from the President

October 14, 2020 by Mt. Tam College

Dear friends,

I hope everyone is doing OK during this tumultuous and trying time. I’m writing to share some brief updates on San Quentin, as well as some longer thoughts about the road ahead, now that we have achieved the historic milestone of becoming Mount Tamalpais College. (Note that “Tamalpais” is pronounced “Tamal PIE iss”.) Making such a profound change in the midst of a pandemic has presented some formidable challenges, but we are finding our way, even locating meaningful opportunities within this period of extraordinary change.

Larger picture at San Quentin: the COVID-19 outbreak there has largely subsided. As of Sunday, October 11, there was one current positive case; 2,152 resolved. So far 28 people at San Quentin have died of the virus. As always, the numbers don’t convey either the physical toll or the enormous psychological impact of the prolonged lockdown—now going on month eight. It’s difficult to describe the frustration of not being able to do more to intervene in this situation, though I know many of you are experiencing it as well.

As you know, at the start of the pandemic we made the judgment call to focus our attention and resources on protecting the mental and physical health of everyone inside, including both incarcerated people and staff, and to help stabilize the prison itself. Given the state of crisis of the prison, including the precarious state of the institutional mail systems, as well as the near-impossibility of delivering high-quality education via course packets, we opted not to try to continue instruction by correspondence. We have, however, worked to ensure that people inside at least have reading and writing materials, as well as quality video content. We also continue to explore the feasibility of creating technological systems to deliver quality courses without face-to-face contact. Even once we have the appropriate systems, equipment, funding, and institutional cooperation, such technology-based strategies will take time to implement, but we hope to make significant progress in the coming months.

All of these strategic decisions reflect our interpretation of our mission. They form our response to the question, what is the role of a higher education institution in the face of a pandemic? Our answer has been to deploy our knowledge, resources, relationships, and experience strategically, to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the most vulnerable members of our community.

As the lockdown drags on, we continually reassess our decisions, like everyone else constantly trying to anticipate the future, while weighing the nature and intensity of the crisis, our organizational capacity, the capacity of the prison, as well as the availability of resources. There is obviously no playbook for this situation.

As we work on these formidable human, material, and logistical challenges, we are also eager to turn attention to some of the other “higher level” projects that will be critical to shaping and sustaining the new Mount Tamalpais College, and advancing through the final initial accreditation stage. In the next year, we anticipate hiring several new positions as we build out our administrative infrastructure. The work of attracting a highly skilled, diverse pool of candidates with relevant professional experience and expertise will be one of our most significant priorities. We will be posting these positions soon and hope that all of you will assist by disseminating these announcements throughout your own networks, and also sharing suggestions for getting the word out.

Another major priority remains diversifying faculty. Some of the obstacles to this goal are fairly obvious: the demographics of those holding advanced degrees in the U.S., as well as those of the Bay Area, are almost the inverse of our student population. Yet recruitment is not just about demographics: individuals’ feelings about, and experiences of, teaching inside vary dramatically. Precisely what makes some individuals most needed can also be what makes the experience of teaching that much more intense. The emotional labor of teaching in a prison is by no means constant, but rather varies dramatically based on myriad often deeply personal factors, including race, gender identity, socioeconomic background, as well as experience with the criminal justice system. What for a person with one background might seem like a novelty—teaching in a prison—for another person might be deeply fraught.

In addition, Black and Latino academics and professionals in particular are constantly being called upon to provide volunteer service, especially for institutions and organizations that serve communities of color. This is one of the most important reasons why the feasibility of transitioning from a volunteer model to paid faculty is something we are now exploring. We are also constantly seeking to understand how the program can better support faculty of color. Nevertheless, the sharp contrast between the racial, ethnic, and class backgrounds of students and those of faculty and staff—which essentially illustrates inequality in the U.S.—remains one of the most persistent and intractable challenges of the field.

Another compelling realm of work in the process of building out the new institution is establishing community norms, pedagogical practices, and administrative standards that honor the cultural, political, and intellectual diversity of our entire community. One of the most complex challenges within the field of higher education in prison is the contrast between the socioeconomic, cultural, and political diversity of the incarcerated population, and program staff and educators’ often more homogenous cultural and political backgrounds. Staff and educators at times approach incarcerated students with strong beliefs about who they are or what they need, which can potentially deprive them of the space that they, like all students, need to think independently and critically, and to develop their own thoughts, ideas, identities, and perspectives.

For better and for worse, the prison is a study in what happens when human beings are systematically deprived of all formal power—when, as is often the case in prison settings, conflict and aggression have a swift and harsh price, and people have no choice but to coexist. One surprising result of this landscape is often a capacity for imagining and engaging with diverse viewpoints that is increasingly rare in the non-incarcerated world. In this sense, a liberal arts college located within a state prison would seem to have an obligation to honor that strength by engaging deeply with the notion not just of intellectual freedom, but even more fundamentally, with the notion that every human being deserves safety and dignity, no matter how radically incomprehensible, repulsive, or threatening they may appear to others. We intend to build a model for higher education that engages seriously with these questions, and that we hope will be worthy of emulation by institutions and communities far beyond the prison.

This is, finally, one of the most compelling aspects of the entire enterprise of Mount Tamalpais College. Higher education itself contains an infinite multitude of tensions, contradictions, and possibilities: it perpetuates social stratification and inequality, and yet its capacity to overcome marginalization and exclusion is unparalleled. Many of academia’s norms and conventions systematically diminish, even erase, entire communities and cultures, yet its tools and practices often possess an extraordinary capacity to elevate and protect human value. Students arrive with profound knowledge and wisdom, and they also need teachers and administrators with the commitment, expertise, and confidence to provide structure and assert standards. Expertise as a concept may contain all kinds of hubris and oblivion, and yet without it, as a society we are surely doomed.

In spite of its tremendous complexity, higher education harbors within it knowledge, resources, tools, practices, and strategies that hold the power to transform individual lives, communities, and society as a whole. Thus, we intend to critically examine, reclaim, and deploy it for the public good. Our hope is that long into the future, Mount Tamalpais College will continue to become a place where students, faculty, staff, administrators, and the community at large can encounter people and ideas from worlds away; approach complex questions with curiosity, patience, humility, mutual respect, and an appreciation for nuance; and where everyone can genuinely thrive. Even in the midst of the profound uncertainties the world currently faces, we are convinced that this work plays a part in repairing the world. We are grateful to have you, our community, along with us on this path.

With warm regards,
Jody Lewen

Fall Program Update

September 21, 2020 by Mt. Tam College

Dear friends,

I hope you are all safe and as well as can be in these strange and hard times. We are still unable to run our college inside the prison, and we miss our students and regular activities tremendously. However, in the meantime we are working on a number of projects to serve our current and former students and to build our college for the future. Updates on our students and some of our projects are below.

Student News

As you’re likely aware, San Quentin was the site of a COVID-19 outbreak that infected approximately two-thirds of the prison. Twenty-six incarcerated people and one officer died in that outbreak. Two of our students were in that number.

In better news, almost 100 of our students have been released from San Quentin since March.

We’re hopeful that there won’t be a second wave of COVID-19 at the prison, but we nevertheless anticipate not being able to resume programs in the prison for some time.

Academic and Educational Programming

In the absence of normal programming, our goal is to continue to offer opportunities for students to learn, think, and engage and to build our college for the future when we can return to campus. This fall, we will be offering the option to students in three Spring 2020 courses to complete these courses remotely: US History, Ethics, and Comparative Religion. The criteria we used to determine courses that students might complete remotely were that students must be able to obtain the remaining course skills, learning, and content without feedback from instructors, by reading and writing alone, and without scaffolding, repeated lessons, or regular assessments, so it was only the three more advanced courses, in which students need less feedback and in-person attention, that qualified. Huge thanks to Ian Sethre, Bill Smoot, Benjamin Perez, and Oliver Organista for your willingness to take on this further teaching!

We are also putting together a reader to send to all students and former students inside the prison, with contributions from many of our faculty. This will be going out in early October, and includes a wide range of fiction, non-fiction, brain teasers, and other intellectually challenging and engaging texts, as well as discussion prompts for further analysis. Our goal is to provide all students with material to help them continue their intellectual growth and discovery, even in the absence of regular coursework. Thank you to everyone who contributed! We will also be sending an activity packet to students who were enrolled in the 99s in the spring.

To continue such opportunities as the pandemic extends into 2021, we’re currently exploring the feasibility of non-credit distance learning modules for Spring 2021. Like the non-credit workshops we’ve conducted in person the past, in topics such as financial accounting, public policy, and environmental justice, these units would introduce students to a discrete topic and allow them the chance to maintain their studies. While it is clear that such projects in no way replace face-to-face learning, we hope to continue to offer students projects to engage their minds and intellects.

We are mindful that our students only make up a portion of those incarcerated at the prison, and that the past six months have run the gamut of extreme stress to illness to trauma for all inside, so we’re happy to have been able to provide some resources available to all those incarcerated at San Quentin as well as to San Quentin staff. Thanks to support from colleagues at iTVS, we’ve been able to supply dozens of documentaries for everyone incarcerated at San Quentin to view on SQTV, the closed-circuit television inside the prison. We sent two sets of packets to all at San Quentin, in April and again in July, with reading material, soap, beef jerky, packets of fish, envelopes and stamps, and other essential goods. We also provided hot food and on-site showers to San Quentin staff. (For more on these efforts, see “Our COVID-19 Response Initiative for the Incarcerated Community in Californi a”.)

An especially exciting development is the work we’ve been doing to expand student access to technology. We’re doing intensive research into options for bringing laptops into the prison for students to use for research, learning, and writing. It’s unclear yet whether there we will be able to use this initiative to develop short-term remote learning opportunities, or if we will have to wait until we can run our physical program again to make laptops available to students, but we are exploring all options, with the help of a consultant, Ethan Annis, with whom we’ve developed a comprehensive plan for our college’s technological advances. As faculty and students well know, this will mark an enormous advance, from the days of our “technology” consisting of whiteboards, DVD players, and overhead projectors, and will allow students access to a panoply of learning opportunities and advances, not to mention befitting our status as an independent college.

Finally, with the partnership and guidance of David Cowan, our Director of Operations, who is also the co-founder of the re-entry organization, Bonafide, we’re working to build out our Alumni Affairs division, to better communicate with and serve our former students. This work involves networking with and offering opportunities and resources for paroled former students, including workshops in computer literacy, workforce development, and financial literacy. Our Director of Student Affairs, David Durand, is leading this work, and we look forward to expanding it back inside the prison to students preparing for parole.

Accreditation

We are moving forward with preparatory work for our independent accreditation application, which is required to move us from Candidacy to Independent Accreditation. This work consists largely of building our capacity to assess student learning and institutional effectiveness. Huge thanks go to Theresa Roeder and Josie Innamorato, who have been leading some key math program review pieces, including a review and analysis of students’ math autobiographies, and generating a report from external reviewers on our math program, which will guide our path to improving it in the future. Last, we have contracted with and started implementing our new student information system, the software that will help us track and report on student data. Because we aren’t currently able to run classes, some data collection on current student learning is impossible, but we’re doing our best to prepare for learning assessment and for reporting on student achievement when we return to the prison, all of which will support the final goal of independent accreditation.

In a time of immense loss and change, when we miss our students and regular program tremendously, we are all working hard to maintain our contact with and support of students and to build towards an improved college. Without wanting to proclaim any positive aspect of a pandemic or wildfires, or any of the other challenges our nation and world currently face, our work gives me hope and determination to continue to move forward.

My very best wishes,
Amy

Our COVID-19 Response Initiative for the Incarcerated Community in California

August 19, 2020 by Mt. Tam College

In June of 2020, San Quentin became one of the largest COVID-19 hotspots in the country with over 2,200 confirmed cases of the virus among the incarcerated population (approximately 75% of the total population) and (as of August) 25 deaths. Many of our current and former students are among these numbers. Hundreds of San Quentin staff members have also been infected, contributing to the fear, despair, and deteriorating conditions inside.

In an effort to mitigate the devastating effects of the virus on the physical and mental health of those impacted by the prison system, the Prison University Project has pivoted from providing education to roughly 10% of San Quentin’s residents, to providing intensive support to the whole community at San Quentin as well as to other prisons in California. A comprehensive overview of these initiatives is summarized below.

Care Packages

In April, we sent care packages—healthy snacks, sanitation supplies, COVID information, and letter writing materials—to the nearly 3,800 residents of San Quentin.

Each one was packed in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag filled with beef jerky, tuna fish, trail mix, a bar of soap, a small pad of paper, envelopes, stamps, pens (or pen fillers, for those in housing units where regular pens are not allowed), and three articles: Why Soap Works, by Ferris Jabr; The Pandemic is a Portal, by Arundhati Roy; and Five months on, what scientists now know about the Coronavirus, by Robin McKie. We also included a letter that explained the package.

In July, we sent a similar package to the nearly 4,200 residents of Avenal State Prison.

In early August, we sent a second round of care packages to San Quentin. These contained beef jerky, halal jerky, tuna fish, energy bars, stamped envelopes, pads of paper, pens (or pen fillers for restricted units), colored pencils (or 1/2 size of color pencils for restricted units), bars of soap, a washcloth, toothpaste, cough drops, informational articles, and a packet from the San Quentin Library with the most-requested CDCR forms and information.

The response from inside has been unexpected and profound. Over the past few months, we have received hundreds of thank-you letters, some from our students (who comprise about 10% of the overall San Quentin population). Others came from the vast communities in San Quentin’s Reception and on Death Row, transfers to San Quentin from the California Institution for Men, and those incarcerated at Avenal. A full library of letters from San Quentin from the summer of 2020 is available here. While everyone expressed appreciation for the packages’ contents, the one thing they stressed the most was the impact of the message it conveyed: There are people on the outside who are thinking of you, and who care.

At the time of writing, we are currently organizing a care package delivery to the California Institution of Men and the California Institution for Women in Chino. Once these deliveries are made, we will have provided over 15,000 care packages to incarcerated people in California.

If you’d like to contribute to these efforts, please visit our care package donation page.

Care Package Initiative Quick Facts

40+ volunteers donated 300+ hours
14,600 bars of soap
44,000 stamped envelopes
2,137.5 lbs of fish
1,781.25 lbs of beef jerky
22,800 pens
11,400 lined notepads
500+ thank you letters received

CDCR Staff Support

Because the health and wellness of the corrections staff is a primary factor in ensuring the safety of the incarcerated residents, we are also supporting prison staff with food trucks and a mobile shower unit to help mitigate the outbreak of COVID-19. This effort supports the physical and mental health and safety of staff, stabilizes essential operations at the prison, and helps contain the spread of COVID-19 inside San Quentin, throughout the county of Marin, and beyond.

The mobile showers were delivered and installed mid-July, and are fully operational for San Quentin staff to use at the end of their shifts throughout the day. This initiative was spearheaded by members of our organization’s Advisory Council, and generously funded by private donors. The Hilton San Francisco Union Square has graciously donated all shampoo, conditioner, and body wash for the operation of the showers, and Key Events stepped into action to voluntarily coordinate the procurement and delivery.

We organized food trucks at Avenal State Prison and the California Institution for Men as well.

Material Support for the Incarcerated Community

San Quentin’s leadership has allowed us to send books, magazines, textbooks, art supplies, hand-crank radios, and digital content (via closed circuit television) to people on Death Row and other areas of the prison outside of the general population areas. Since those inside can’t access the library as usual, we have also been able to secure 19 library carts to support the staff in delivering materials throughout the prison.

Advocacy

We are communicating frequently with prison leadership, advocacy organizations, our reentry network, legal professionals, funders, and others to identify how we can support each other and, most importantly, what we can do to save lives and lessen the devastating impacts of the crisis.

These organizations include:

Bonafide
Ella Baker Center
Re:store Justice
Amend at UCSF
Reform Alliance
Uncommon Law
Rosen, Bien, Galvan & Grunfeld, LLP
Prison Law Office
Prisoner Reentry Network
Northern California Innocence Project

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Student Juan Moreno Haines on COVID-19 Inside San Quentin

August 14, 2020 by design_agency

Prison University Project student and Senior Editor of the San Quentin News Juan Moreno Haines has emerged as a voice of the incarcerated experience during the COVID-19 crisis. His published pieces collected below reflect what’s happening inside San Quentin in real time.

“In San Quentin Prison, getting the flu can land you in solitary confinement,” February 20, 2020. The Appeal.
“Inside Prison Amid Coronavirus Pandemic: Incarcerated Journalist Says Millions Behind Bars at Risk,” March 17, 2020. DemocracyNow!
“How coronavirus is changing life inside San Quentin,” March 27, 2020. The Appeal.
“In overcrowded San Quentin, coronavirus shelter-in-place measures mean decreased quality of life,” April 16, 2020. The Appeal.
“‘Man Down:’ Left in the Hole at San Quentin During a Coronavirus Crisis,” July 7, 2020. Solitary Watch.
“At San Quentin, Overcrowding Laid the Groundwork for an Explosive COVID-19 Outbreak,” July 21, 2020. The Appeal.
“Struggling to Survive at San Quentin:’We Are Dying in Here’,” August 14, 2020. Solitary Watch.

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Inside San Quentin Prison, You Sit and Wait Until COVID-19 Comes for You

July 23, 2020 by design_agency

As a working prison journalist, I wanted to keep my eyes and ears wide-open. I wanted to detail everything going on around me as COVID-19 raged out of control here. But a fog crept through me. Was it just a cold, a sinus infection, influenza—all things I’ve battled before? I woke to strange chills in the night; there was an acrid aftertaste along the back of my tongue. Maybe I just needed to pull out a blanket.

Is this what COVID-19 feels like? My temperature had been normal every day. My breathing remained strong and clear. I wanted to believe that meant I was fine.

Even though I knew I wasn’t.

On June 22 and 23, everyone in my building, San Quentin’s North Block, lined up for COVID-19 testing. I had just begun to feel weirdly awful. I overheard other guys describing the same things I was feeling. None of us wanted to alert the medical staff. So, you admit you’re sick? Well, let’s remove you from the few familiar comforts you have and throw you in an empty cell for a 14-day quarantine. That’s the protocol we all feared worse than COVID-19.

The guards called names throughout the day. “Pack all your property, you’re moving.” We assumed these guys had tested positive, but that wasn’t made clear. My cellie and I listened intently whenever a fresh set of names got called, holding our breath. When we weren’t on the list, we went back about our days, locked in the cell. So far, so good.

All I wanted to do the night of June 25 was watch some television before, hopefully, passing out. I hadn’t slept well all week.

Then the guards called my cellie’s name, with another group of housing moves, just after 8 p.m. “Damn,” he said as he jumped off his bunk.

For the next hour and a half, I lay on my bunk, staying out of the way as he packed up. As usual, the tier officer came by around 9 p.m. and double-locked all the cell doors. The building went quiet. Around 9:30 p.m., they repeated the list of names from earlier. “Get ready to move.”

Then they added one more. “Garcia, 409, you’re moving, too. Pack your stuff.”

Now it was my turn to say “Damn.”

San Quentin’s South Block, where quarantined inmates are housed, is separated into four alphabetized units — Alpine, Badger, Carson and Donner. Sometime after 11 p.m., one of the North Block’s Inmate Disability Assistance Program workers, my buddy Ron Ehde, stopped by. “You’re getting housed over in Donner,” Ehde told my cellie, sharing information he had gleaned from events of the day. By no means was it official, but it was more than anyone else would provide for several days. “It looks like that’s where guys who tested positive are being put right now.”

“And you, your test probably came back negative,” Ehde explained to me. “But you’ve been celled up with a positive. So they have to quarantine you somewhere else, over in Carson.”

Six of us made our way across the prison around midnight, pushing rickety carts overflowing with boxes, bags, odds and ends. Four men, including my cellie, disappeared into Donner. I was left at the edge of Carson with another prisoner. An officer there gave us our cell numbers on the third tier.

After a couple of trips lugging boxes up and down, I began to wonder if I was experiencing the COVID shortness of breath. I was woozy and sweating. Strange faces stared silently out at me from the cells I passed. This was an administrative segregation (ADSEG) housing unit—each man housed alone, left to stew in his own thoughts.

I peered into the open door of a depressingly dirty cell. “Has this cell been properly disinfected?” I asked.

“This cell’s been empty for a long time, since way before there was any COVID,” the officer said. “You don’t gotta worry about any of that.”

I knew the deal—just get all my stuff into the cell and let him close the door. I’d have to clean the entire cell before I could begin to feel comfortable—8 p.m. in bed watching TV seemed a lifetime ago.

There’s a demented cacophony of human voices universal to any ADSEG unit. Listening to my new neighbors in Carson, I could hear anger, pain, frustration. Some of these guys had been stuck here for months.

Eventually, I did receive a notice informing me that I’d tested positive for COVID-19—one more number in a group that has now passed 2,000. Fifteen San Quentin inmates have died.

During a routine temperature and breathing check, I told a nurse about my bouts of nausea, my night sweats, my constant weakness.

“You have no shortness of breath. You don’t need any hospitalization,” the nurse told me. “Your body is just fighting off the virus. Keep taking your Tylenol and drinking lots of water.

“You’re one of the lucky ones, sir.”

I don’t feel lucky.

Attribution: This article originally appeared in the Washington Post on July 23, 2020. Read Story

Mobile Showers and Food Trucks Provided for San Quentin Staff

July 23, 2020 by design_agency

The Prison University Project coordinated the installation of mobile showers for corrections staff to help mitigate the outbreak of COVID-19. This effort supports the physical and mental health and safety of staff, stabilizes essential operations at the prison, and helps contain the spread of COVID-19 inside San Quentin, throughout the county of Marin, and beyond.

The mobile showers were delivered and installed last week and are fully operational for San Quentin staff to use at the end of their shifts throughout the day. We also provided food trucks for staff to grab a bite to eat before or after their shifts.

Support for San Quentin staff is one of the many COVID-19 emergency response initiatives in which we are currently participating. Most notably, we coordinated the successful deliveries of care packages to the entire populations of San Quentin and Avenal State Prisons. More information about this project is available here. San Quentin’s leadership has also allowed us to send magazines, textbooks, art supplies, hand-crank radios, and digital content (via closed circuit television) to people on death row and other areas of the prison outside of the general population areas.

The mobile shower installation was spearheaded by members of our organization’s Advisory Council, and generously funded by private donors. The Hilton San Francisco Union Square has graciously donated all shampoo, conditioner and body wash for the operation of the showers and Key Events stepped into action to voluntarily coordinate the procurement and delivery.

We have worked with the community since early in the crisis, underscoring the fact that helping the staff also helps the incarcerated and the community at large.

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Voices from Inside: Full Library

July 17, 2020 by Mt. Tam College

At the end of April, the Prison University Project distributed gift bags to all of the nearly 3,900 people incarcerated at San Quentin. Each one was packed in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, filled with beef jerky, tuna fish, trail mix, a bar of soap, a small pad of paper, envelopes, stamps, pens (or pen fillers, for those in housing units where regular pens are not allowed), and three articles. We also included a letter that explained the package.

We received over 300 letters in response to the effort with a wide range of topics, from purely thank you messages to reports on conditions inside. All of them provide a window into the incarcerated experience during the COVID-19 crisis, and we feel they are important to share broadly. Below you will find a full library of letters from those who have given us permission to publish.

A summary of all our emergency response initiatives is available here.

If you’d like to contribute to these efforts, please visit our fundraising page.

Additional updates from our Executive Director on the COVID-19 crisis at San Quentin are available in the “From the Director” section of our News page.

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Acevedo, Jr., Luciano

DeHoyos, Richard Lucio

Gallardo, Gilbert Jess

Hamilton, Alexander Rashad

Kermit (C. Leee Ward)

Mickey, Douglas Scott

Rosales-Reyes, Fabian

Ross, Stuart

Ruiz, Angel

Ruiz, Daniel

Sanchez-Fuentes, Edgardo

Care Packages Delivered to Avenal State Prison

July 14, 2020 by design_agency

In early July, the Prison University Project distributed care packages to the incarcerated population of Avenal State Prison. Each one was packed in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag, filled with beef jerky, tuna fish, trail mix, a bar of soap, a small pad of paper, envelopes, stamps, pens (or pen fillers, for those in housing units where regular pens are not allowed), and three articles. We also included a letter that explained the package.

We previously delivered packages to the incarcerated population of San Quentin, and their letters in response are available here.

If you are interested in contributing to future care package deliveries, please visit our fundraising page .

Please note that the Prison University Project became Mount Tamalpais College in September 2020.

Voices from Inside: Transfers from California Institution for Men

July 9, 2020 by Mt. Tam College

We received over 300 letters in response to the effort with a wide range of topics, from purely thank you messages to reports on conditions inside. More recently we have also heard from many of the people who were transferred to San Quentin from the California Institution for Men just a few weeks ago, as part of the Department’s ill-fated attempt to protect them from the current outbreak there. Thanks to the support of San Quentin staff, we were also able to get packages to them.

With permission, we are sharing a small sample of those letters below. We intend to post more in the near future. Additional letters from San Quentin residents are available here.

Click through to read each letter in its entirety.