Current Affairs

Dear friends,

Given how much is changing rapidly at San Quentin, I’m writing to share another update, as well as some practical information. For anyone new to this list, it may be helpful to read this June 18th update and/or the previous ones for further background.

For those with loved ones inside: if/when you are able to be in contact with your person, we encourage you to make sure that the “next of kin” information they have on file is accurate and up-to-date. This way if they become ill, the prison or hospital will be able to release their medical information to you. The “Authorization for Release of Information” form is linked here in English and Spanish. You might consider printing this form out, filling in your information, and sending it to them to submit. Instructions for doing so can be found here under the Requesting Protected Health Information (PHI) tab. Contact information for the Medical Department of each California prison is here.

As of Wednesday, July 8th, 1,387 people incarcerated at San Quentin have been confirmed to be COVID-19 positive, out of a population of nearly 3,800. Over 50 people are currently being treated at outside hospitals. (Information about the number of current cases at all institutions can be found on the CDCR Population COVID Tracker page.) Testing at San Quentin continues, though of course test results simply reflect a given moment in time, as long as people remain at risk of exposure.

As elsewhere, not everyone who has tested positive at the prison has or will become seriously ill, or even symptomatic. Yet without regular programs, or visiting, and because phone calls are scarce and mail has slowed to a crawl, things have also become immensely stressful for everyone with any connection to people inside. Most information about the wellbeing of people at San Quentin arrives through word of mouth, from people who are in touch via regular phone calls, paper mail, contraband cell phones, or occasionally through social media. The fact that medical information is also private can make sharing it complex, even among friends and colleagues.

Regarding conditions inside: we are learning a great deal through some staff, as well as from letters we continue to receive from people who received our care packages at the end of April, including many who are not students. 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. Some of their letters are here.

In short, conditions inside have become extremely bleak. San Quentin has always been one of the most dilapidated prisons in the system; and yet people have long fought to stay there, because of all the programs. But since March, all educational, recreational and self-help programs have been shut down. As more and more staff become ill and staffing levels drop precipitously, access to showers, yard, canteen, phones, laundry, mail, and other basic services have continued to deteriorate. The kitchen recently stopped functioning altogether due to multiple positive COVID-19 cases among staff, causing the prison to move to three noxious bagged meals a day, and creating further anger and tension throughout the prison. Meanwhile, the increasing number of prisoners now being treated at outside hospitals is also further depleting staffing as each person, no matter their condition, requires the presence of at least two correctional officers. Conditions in Reception, where many cells have no electricity and TVs and radios are not allowed, have been particularly horrific, as the combination of isolation, anxiety, and boredom increasingly frays people’s nerves and strains mental health. People with existing mental health challenges and other conditions or disabilities requiring extra support are now especially vulnerable, since most clinical programs and services have been drastically scaled back or discontinued.

Prison staff are also experiencing tremendous stress, as they seek to manage their own worries about becoming ill, while struggling to keep things running, and continue showing up for their colleagues. In some instances, entire cell blocks have been staffed by one or two officers. Staff who are now being drawn (often involuntarily) from other institutions to provide back-up are not only unfamiliar with San Quentin’s highly idiosyncratic operations and institutional culture, but are typically those with the least seniority, and thus experience. Some have only been correctional officers for a few days.

So far, over 170 San Quentin staff have contracted COVID-19. Within CDCR, staff can be “ordered over,” meaning required to work additional shifts, often back-to-back, with little or no notice. Lately many are working multiple doubles in a single week, leaving them increasingly stressed and exhausted. Many have been sleeping in their cars at the prison to avoid driving while extremely sleep deprived. Some have also moved out of their own homes out of fear of exposing their families to the virus. Staff stationed at hospitals are in some cases required to sit in the room with the COVID patient, typically for eight hours, with just a cloth mask. Some community members also do not consider people incarcerated at San Quentin part of the communities that the local hospitals exist to serve, although they are counted as Marin County residents. Instead, they fear that ill prisoners will, as they see it, deprive other ill community members of hospital space.

The cautiously “good news” is that a “unified command center” is now finally being created at San Quentin, to better coordinate efforts, reinforce staffing, and bring in additional skilled medical support and equipment. Tents have been set up on the Lower Yard, to provide more space and allow for increased physical distancing throughout the institution. From what we understand, people now housed in the gym will be moved into the tents, and a field hospital will be set up on grounds.

While we are hopeful that these long-overdue steps will improve conditions on the ground, the fact remains that San Quentin’s physical design and crowding will continue to make creating adequate space, much less quarantining or medically treating large numbers of people, nearly impossible. Roughly 500 people live in densely populated dormitories; most of the rest of the population lives two people in a cell. The only cells with actual doors (as opposed to bars) are the 89 cells in the Adjustment Center, which is one of the harshest segregation units in the state. When it was determined shortly after their arrival that some of the 127 elderly and medically fragile people from CIM were in fact COVID-positive, this is where they were placed—the AC. And yet even this failed to prevent the spread of the virus throughout the institution.

Most California prisons face similar problems, though in varying proportions and degrees. The two main risk factors are the nature of the housing (particularly dorms), and the number of people at the given institution who are older or have underlying medical conditions. Based on the most recent data available, over 10,000 people within CDCR are over the age of 60. San Quentin’s population is one of the oldest in the state, along with CIM and the California Health Care Facility in Stockton. The California Medical Facility in Vacaville is both a prison and a hospital. It provides both psychiatric and medical care to the most physically and psychologically vulnerable and elderly prisoners in the state; it also has a hospice unit—and all of this, in a mostly dorm-like setting. CMF just announced their first confirmed COVID-19 case last week.

As many of you are aware, it was the transfer of the group of people from CIM to San Quentin at the end of May that apparently unleashed San Quentin’s current COVID-19 outbreak. Clearly everything must be done now to prevent this from happening at other institutions—or at least to delay it as long as possible. Without a doubt, that transfer was ill-conceived, and disastrously executed: testing could have been done much closer to their departure; the actual transport could have been conducted much more safely; and the men could have been properly quarantined from the moment they arrived.

Yet the way that whole episode did go also reflected a breathtakingly simple and unsurprising reality: CDCR lacks the expertise, training, material resources, or facilities to protect the people in its custody from a pandemic. While medical care within the system has improved drastically over the last 13 years as a result of the appointment of a Medical Receiver, the system is nowhere close to being prepared to handle this crisis—and the Receiver’s Office has so far been unwilling or unable to muster the political will and resources required to compensate for this reality. The Governor has the authority to do so, but has so far been unwilling to risk the enormous political capital that it would require. At the same time, no one has been able to create a legal bridge between the Receiver’s court-ordered mandate to bring medical care within the system into compliance with Constitutional standards, and the dire need to radically change conditions (including population size) in order to prevent widespread illness and death as a result of the pandemic.

And thus here we are. The Department did not distribute masks to staff or prisoners, or even direct them to wear them, until the very end of April. To suggest that this recent episode at San Quentin was a matter of localized incompetence or leadership failure is to deny the reality that the system itself—not just the material reality of the prison, but the political dynamics by which it is held hostage—is, by their very design, a death trap. Instead, that whole episode merely reflected what happens when an extraordinary capacity for magical thinking converges with overwhelming political pressure, and desperation, to create safety where there is simply no safety to be found. In reality, the only way to prevent a massive loss of life remains evacuating thousands of people from the system now, while investing vast resources in supporting a healthy and safe reentry for those individuals, as well as protecting the health and safety of those who remain.

As far as I can tell, the people who know the system well and yet still maintain that it can, as it currently exists, navigate safely through this disaster, are either under great political pressure, or are simply too overwhelmed by the humanitarian and logistical implications to believe otherwise. Within CDCR, the relentless pressures of organizational culture, politics, and the will towards professional self-preservation prevent most from speaking their minds. Contrary to some public opinion, they also lack the political authority to take any action that would substantially change the situation; this power lies with the Governor. Yet fear of the political consequences of releasing thousands of low risk “lifers” whose commitment offenses are the only thing that renders their release “risky”—politically, not in any public safety sense—continues to forestall any serious action.

What we need right now is political leadership that 1) directly addresses the public’s misguided fear of anyone who has been convicted of a serious violent crime; 2) proactively seeks out real strategies for safely housing and supporting thousands of people as they return from prison; 3) establishes new standards for health and safety inside California prisons; and, above all 4) transforms the state’s sentencing laws. What we do not need are legislators, advocates, or members of the media who seek to craft sensationalistic scandals out of deeply entrenched systemic problems, or sidestep collective societal failures by, for example, calling for the heads of the leadership of San Quentin or CDCR. Things at San Quentin right now would be dramatically worse if we did not have the warden we have today.

One last thought I’d like to share: Many of the people at San Quentin who are at greatest risk from COVID-19 are people who were sentenced to death and have been incarcerated for many years, as their sentences are being appealed. Most of the men who have so far died at San Quentin have been condemned. We know their names, ironically, because it is CDCR policy to release them, unlike other incarcerated people: Richard Stitely, Dewayne Carey, Scott Erskine, Manuel Machado Alvarez, Joseph Cordova, and David Reed. As I read the first few newspaper articles on their deaths, which generally mention their often deeply disturbing commitment offenses in the first sentence, I began to dread what the public response is going to be—and what the public’s tolerance level is going to be for mass death within the prison system. Part of me thought, I hope people understand how atypical these offenses are, and then I thought, no—they are all fully human, and every single human being has a story. There must be space in this society for the humanity of every single person. The coming weeks and months will likely challenge us in unprecedented ways to respond to the question of why the lives of people in prison—including those who may have committed extreme violence—have value and meaning. I am so grateful for the community we have in all of you, and believe we are up to the task.

Warm regards,

Jody

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

Dear friends,

I hope everyone is doing OK, during this extraordinarily complex and painful time.

I’ve been struggling to write this latest update for the last several weeks, and it is not getting any easier. Last week San Quentin reported its first confirmed cases of COVID-19, apparently the result of transferring people from the California Institution for Men, in an attempt to shield them from the massive outbreak there. For statistical details of the current situation across the state, see the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s website, which now lists numbers of cases, people tested, and deaths.

What the numbers of course cannot convey is the terror of this situation for people inside and those who love them. Watching the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases climb while it gradually spreads to more prisons is like watching a fire jump from one building to the next, with tens of thousands of people trapped inside. A handful of passersby see what’s happening; some stand and watch; most just walk by.

Right now, hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people are confronting the threat of COVID-19 in squalid, medically unsafe prison cells and dormitories; with inadequate nutritious food, personal protective equipment, hygiene articles, educational materials, accurate scientific information about the virus, or current news. Their ability to communicate with loved ones, about whose physical health or economic situation they may be deeply worried, is severely limited. They are also justifiably terrified. Some, especially those who are already in ill health or elderly, are expecting to die.

Yet in spite of the formidable advocacy work being done for the release of the medically vulnerable and/or elderly, scant resources are being invested in even the most basic needs of those who remain inside. In the midst of the current explosion of awareness, outrage and solidarity, when literally the entire world’s attention is focused specifically on racist state violence and neglect, the normalized brutality and negligence of conditions inside the U.S. prison system remain of little interest to most Americans.

It’s not hard to understand why people seeking to address the crisis of COVID-19 in prisons would focus on trying to remove people from that danger. Yet most of us would agree that even the most herculean efforts are unlikely to bring about the release of more than 10% of the population. It would thus seem (to put it mildly) logical to also invest resources in the most immediate health and safety needs of both prisoners and staff. Yet most of the largest criminal justice advocacy and philanthropy organizations remain almost entirely focused on the cause of releases, rather than also addressing conditions inside.

The most pressing issues right now relate specifically to supplies, facilities management, and operational policy: Procuring adequate personal protective equipment, cleaning supplies, healthy food and water; repairing or replacing ventilation systems; overhauling the prison TV systems; installing adequate IT infrastructure to support technology-based delivery of education, visiting, medical care, psychological services, and recreational activities; revising Departmental policy regarding allowable materials and access to technology; navigating legally complex labor/management issues (e.g., screening and testing, forming staff cohorts to limit virus spread); and making emergency funding rapidly available for all of these things, as well as for washing machines, changing facilities, quality food services, hotel rooms and other facilities, to support staff mental and physical health. The Department also needs to have emergency plans in place, in the event that staffing shortages become more acute; large numbers of prisoners become severely ill when local ICUs are already overloaded; fire season further degrades the quality of air in the housing units; or an earthquake isolates the institution for an extended period of time.

Tackling these types of projects requires deep familiarity with Departmental policies, as well as close collaboration with staff and administrators. Unfortunately, those communities and organizations that are typically most concerned about the wellbeing of incarcerated people are generally those least likely to be connected to the relevant professional networks. They are also the ones that people working in corrections are most likely to feel threatened by. Those organizations that do have strong contacts inside the world of corrections are often reluctant to openly address issues like living conditions. Other advocates are averse, either as a matter of principle or of public image, to the idea of engaging in a practical sense with prisons. Those who control the prisons and those who care about the people inside are traditionally conditioned to view each other as enemies.

One wonders what would happen if the world of corrections were not so isolated and distrustful of “outsiders,” and if it were subject to vastly more external oversight and accountability. Yet the refusal of large segments of the advocacy community to engage directly with incarcerated people—to, in a sense, look them in the eye, to recognize them as more than a remote, unfortunate abstraction—is a long-standing problem. And its already dire consequences are now escalating sharply.

But this failure to fully register currently incarcerated people as living human beings is not just a moral issue; it is also strategic. Incarcerated people are not only passive subjects of the system; they are also potentially extraordinary agents of change. This country’s greatest experts on systemic racism, as well as on police, prosecutorial, and judicial abuse, live in its prisons, and they are unparalleled advocates and witnesses. Tending to their wellbeing while also amplifying their voices—not just after they have survived incarceration—is an essential strategy for bringing about large-scale change.

At the end of April, the Prison University Project created two initiatives. The first was to distribute 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: 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.

The response from inside was unexpected and profound. Within days, we began receiving hundreds of thank-you letters. Some were from our students (who comprise about 10% of the overall San Quentin population); others came from the vast communities in Reception and on Death Row. With permission, we are sharing a small sample of those letters here. We intend to post more in the near future.

While everyone expressed appreciation for the package’s contents, the 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. A lot of people described the actual emotional sensations of receiving it—and of realizing it was a gift for them; the way it changed the atmosphere of the whole housing unit, the sounds of joy on the tier. Some described how it transformed their mood, or even their sense of themselves as human. Others said it inspired them to be kind; gave them hope about the future; or strengthened their resolve to keep going. A handful shared artwork or poetry. Many had been in prison for decades. Some had not received mail or a package in years; a few never had. The enclosed articles contained the first information many had ever received on the science of COVID-19. Quite a number expressed gratitude on behalf of others in their unit, reminding us that some people we would not hear from because they cannot read or write.

Some people shared their fears about getting sick—especially those with serious medical conditions, or who are older. Many more expressed concerns about loved ones on the outside, and the frustration of not being able to be there for them. Others described their bleak living conditions—poor ventilation, barely any time outside, scarce cleaning supplies. Many requested reading materials, puzzles, legal information, or a pen pal. A significant number of people acknowledged CDCR’s efforts to prevent the spread of the virus, but also described the impossibility of social distancing, particularly in dorms or showers, and their fear and frustration about some staff’s inconsistent use of masks. People in Reception shared their extraordinary frustration with being stuck indefinitely in a housing unit with no TVs or radios, since COVID-19 had caused transfers to be indefinitely suspended.

Together, the letters provide remarkable testimony about what it is like to be in prison, especially right now—and not just materially, but psychologically. Most of the “public speaking” and outreach I’ve done since the letters began arriving has entailed my channeling what I’ve learned from them to the outside world. This is more or less a continuation of what my job has been like for the last twenty years, but now with some much higher stakes.

The other for-us unprecedented initiative we undertook in April, also with funding from an individual donor, and tremendous support from the San Quentin administration, was a food truck appreciation event for prison staff. Over the course of a single day, from five in the morning till eleven at night, several Mexican food trucks served burritos during each of the three shift changes to well over a thousand people.

At San Quentin, nearly half of all employees are medical workers and other non-custody staff. The rest are custody and administrators who work throughout the prison. Those on site right now are those who cannot work from home. Most come in sustained direct contact with other people there, and thus experience some level of at least potential exposure to COVID-19.

Over the course of the day, the long, wide stretch of pavement that overlooks the Bay on the way to the Count Gate was transformed into something faintly like a street fair. Second watch staff started arriving in the morning, when it was still dark; a steady stream heading towards the gate, lugging gear or water, some chatting, some with heads down. Throughout the day faces puzzled and then eventually brightened with a smile once they finally believed that the food really was there for them.

Most people who work at San Quentin commute long hours each way, often with van pools. Hundreds also live in trailers on or near prison grounds because there is virtually no affordable local housing. Most prison workers feel some degree of dread or danger about being at work; the pandemic is obviously compounding the physical and mental toll of the job beyond measure. At a time like this, it felt meaningful to be able to offer something so simple and positive. I wonder how the climate of the prison might change if staff—and everyone else—felt that taken care of every day.

As of this writing, we are working to arrange a similar pair of initiatives, this time at a prison in the Central Valley with over 4,000 incarcerated people, 1,000 staff, and a serious COVID-19 outbreak. Depending on our fundraising capacity, and the receptivity of other institutions, we hope to continue these efforts even further in the future.

For several weeks I hesitated to write about these projects, loath to turn bleak lessons about long-term exposure to extreme emotional and material deprivation and toxic stress into a feel-good story about us. But the intensely positive emotional responses to these initiatives illustrate vividly both the need and the opportunities that I urgently hope to convey. Both events also permanently altered my understanding of what it means for any act of goodwill to be effective, significant, or trivial, in a way that I hope will inspire others to do something, anything, rather than just standing by. They also strengthened my resolve to continue doing whatever we possibly can to provide material and emotional support to the entire community at San Quentin, as well as other institutions.

So we will continue… working to ensure that all incarcerated people and prison staff have plentiful access to personal protective equipment and supplies; facilitate the flow of information to the outside world about institutional conditions, needs, challenges, and solutions; foster productive dialogue and collaboration between diverse individuals and organizations; educate and advise journalists, policymakers, family members and other stakeholders; provide quality reading materials and other paper and video-based supplies for education, recreation, and health; support the research and program development efforts of funders; and organize resources in support of people who are now leaving prison during the pandemic.

Above all, we will do everything in our power to make heard the voices, and the vision, of our students and all the other people throughout the system, to mitigate as much as possible the harm of COVID-19, and to help the world understand that they are human beings whose lives have value.

Jody Lewen
Executive Director

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