California to transform San Quentin State Prison with Scandinavian ideas, rehab focus
Luis went to prison on a life sentence 16 years ago, at age 17. Food came on a tray and leftovers were removed on the same brown plastic rectangle.
So he had never cooked or done dishes before moving to the "Little Scandinavia" unit in the Pennsylvania State Correctional Institution at Chester last year — an experiment modeled after Northern European systems of incarceration, where the goal is less about punishment and more about turning out people who can be good neighbors.
Here, Luis (Pennsylvania prison rules prevent me from using his last name) has use of four stainless steel stoves, two blond-wood islands, pots including a bright blue Dutch oven and a fridge that holds groceries from a nearby supermarket. There are even some not-too-sharp knives.
"It dawned on me that all these years I had become conditioned and dependent," he told me, standing in that spotless kitchen shared by 54 men. Being able to clean up after himself was an autonomy he didn't even know he wanted, or needed.
This week, Gov. Gavin Newsom will announce that California will take its own leap forward, rethinking the purpose of prison by "ending San Quentin as we know it," he told me Wednesday.
By 2025, California's first and most infamous penitentiary, where criminals including Charles Manson and Scott Peterson have done time, will become something entirely different: the largest center of rehabilitation, education and training in the California prison system, and maybe the nation. No longer will it be a maximum security facility. Instead, it will be a place for turning out good neighbors, incorporating Scandinavian methods.
The vision for a new San Quentin includes job training for careers that can pay six figures, trades such as plumbers, electricians or truck drivers, and using the complex as a last stop of incarceration before release. Tucked in the proposed budget Newsom released weeks ago is $20 million to jump-start the effort.
The plan for San Quentin is "not just about reform, but about innovation," a chance to "hold ourselves to a higher level of ambition and look to completely reimagine what prison means," Newsom said.
Along with Pennsylvania, the Scandinavian philosophy of incarceration has already been implemented in pilot programs in Oregon and ultra-red North Dakota, as well as in small-scale experiments inside a few other California prisons.
But what's envisioned for San Quentin is on a different scale. The choice of this prison, tucked on a peninsula in wealthy Marin County and overlooking San Francisco Bay, is a statement by Newsom about justice reform and about California — one with the potential not only to change what it means to serve time, but also to create a pathway to safer communities that our current system has failed to deliver.
Despite consent decrees, prison closures and even the de facto end of the death penalty, California's approach to crime and punishment remains problematic, as it does across the U.S. Our recidivism rates remain stubbornly high, people of color are disproportionately incarcerated, and both conservatives and liberals make loud arguments as to why.
Fundamentally, we can't agree on what prison is for — should its main goal be to punish, or guide? To be a source of ongoing suffering, or opportunity?
Many on the right say prison should serve as a deterrent: Serving time is not supposed to be pleasant, and hard conditions teach hard lessons. On the left, many say restorative justice and other means of diverting people from incarceration should be the priority.
But do such dichotomies miss the point?
The reality is that most people who go into prison come out again, more than 30,000 a year in California, Newsom points out. So public safety depends on people choosing to change, and having opportunities for a sustainable, law-abiding life. Otherwise they will simply go back to what they know, be it selling dope, robbing houses or worse.
"Do you want them coming back with humanity and some normalcy, or do you want them coming back more bitter and more beaten down?" Newsom asks.
The Scandinavian model looks at the loss of liberty and separation from community as the punishment. During that separation, life should be as normal as possible so that people can learn to make better choices without being preoccupied by fear and violence.
Influencing people to make those better choices, "should be the common goal, no matter what your opinions are, where your beliefs are, what political party you are affiliated with," Gina Clark, the superintendent of Chester (the Pennsylvania equivalent of a warden) told me.
Clark inherited Little Scandinavia from her predecessor and is waiting for more data before deciding if it works. But incarceration's purpose, she said, should always look beyond the offender to the community. Will this person help or hurt their community when released? Have we done everything we can to ensure it is the former?
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