SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — Visiting San Quentin, California’s oldest prison, which once housed the gas chamber used to execute prisoners on the country’s largest death row, Governor Gavin Newsom on Friday touted a plan to renovate the ability in favor of a rehabilitation center approach that might turn out to be a task model for the world.
The power will be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, and greater than 500 death row inmates will be transferred elsewhere within the California penitentiary system. There are over 2,000 other prisoners sentenced to lesser sentences in prison.
“We wish to be the premier restorative justice facility on this planet – that is the goal,” Newsom told Newsom of the warehouse where his projected programs will be stored. “San Quentin is iconic, San Quentin is world famous. If San Quentin can do it, it could be done anywhere else.”
Despite its ambitious tone, Newsom provided some concrete details on what the brand new system will appear to be and who it will serve. It was unclear how far the plan would go to re-imagine the prison that housed a few of California’s most notorious criminals reminiscent of Charles Manson and the location of violent uprisings within the Sixties and Seventies.
However it has also turn out to be known for its progressive programs where prisoners can earn a level, write for an award-winning newspaper, study the humanities, and receive vocational training to organize them to re-enter society.
A bunch of public safety experts, crime victims and ex-cons will advise the state on the transition, which Newsom hopes to finish by 2025. He’s committing $20 million to the plan.
The move by Newsom, who recently entered his second term, comes after his 2019 term moratorium on executionswhich drew criticism from some who said it was neglecting the will of voters who upheld the death penalty on the ballot box in 2016.
Within the years 2020-2022, there have been over 100 people sentenced to death transferred from San Quentin to other prisons in a pilot program run by the state. The state spends about $326 million a yr serving San Quentin, and the Newsom administration hasn’t said whether the brand new approach will get monetary savings.
The newest plan is an element of a decades-long transformation of the state’s sprawling prison system, which went into federal receivership in 2005 after a court found prison medical care was so poor it amounted to cruel and weird punishment. A panel of judges later ordered the state to drastically reduce the variety of prisoners as a result of overcrowding.
About 800 individuals are released from San Quentin every year, Newsom said, with the goal of stopping them from committing one other crime and returning to the system.
San Quentin inmate Juan Moreno Haines said the plan would help ensure taxpayer money is being spent to finish the continued cycle of repeat crimes.
“I’ll ask Californians: what do you wish?” he said. “Do you wish them to come back out of prison higher rehabilitated with skills, or do you wish them to come back out worse than they were to maintain feeding this model of crime?”
Newsom’s office cited as exemplary the Norwegian approach to serving a jail sentence, which focuses on preparing people to return to society. Officials from the state’s Department of Prisons and Rehabilitation toured Norwegian prisons in 2019where they noted positive interactions between prisoners and staff. Oregon and North Dakota also drew inspiration from Scandinavian politics.
In Norwegian maximum security prisons, the cells are sometimes more like dormitories with extra furniture reminiscent of chairs, desks and even televisions, and prisoners have access to a kitchen. Norway has a low rate of return to crime after leaving prison.
In line with 2015 figures, two-thirds of those convicted of crimes in California were re-arrested inside two years of being released. test by the Public Policy Institute of California. Newsom said efforts to lower that rate would increase public safety.
Success will be determined “on the willingness and commitment of individuals to alter themselves, to alter their attitudes and turn out to be positively engaged residents after they return to the community. We have now to support people on this path,” he said.
Prison Law Office, a public-interest law firm that filed a lawsuit over prison medical care in California in 2001, advocated this approach to prisons and arranged tours of European correctional facilities for US lawmakers. During a 2011 trip to prisons in Germany and the Netherlands, Donald Specter, the law firm’s chief executive, said he was shocked to see that they were “way more humane” than prisons within the country.
“While I used to be there, I assumed, ‘oh my god, we should always attempt to import this philosophy to the US,'” he said.
Critics of Newsom’s announcement said it was as a result of continuing to prioritize individuals who committed crimes over victims.
“We’re in a climate where all the pieces is about criminals and criminals, not innocent victims who’ve been victimized, traumatized, harmed – devastated members of the family living without their family members because they were murdered and brought away too soon,” said Patricia Wenskunas, CEO Crime Survivors Resource Center.
But Amber-Rose Howard, executive director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, a gaggle dedicated to reducing the prisoner population, is just not convinced that the “Norwegian model” would work within the US since the two countries have very different histories.
“Newsom should stay on top of closing more prisons, implementing policies that would cut back incarceration and convey people home,” she said.
Speakers who joined Newsom said they hope to construct on quite a few already successful programs in San Quentin. The prison houses the primary accredited elementary school within the country, situated entirely behind bars, offering classes in literature, astronomy and US government. The prisoners recorded and produced the hugely popular podcast ” The noise of the ears while serving time.
Phil Melendez, a former San Quentin inmate who now works with the Smart Justice California advocacy group, said the rehabilitation programs the state hopes to expand will be certain that former prisoners are successful as they re-enter society.
“During (my) time here, I discovered a recent sense of hope,” Melendez said in prison. “I discovered healing.”