A few weeks before high school graduation, I drove across the Golden Gate Bridge toward San Quentin State Prison — now rebranded as San Quentin Rehabilitation Center — a level-two penitentiary just off Highway 101. I visited San Quentin as part of an English elective taught at my high school: “Voices of Incarceration.”
In the class, we listened to formerly-incarcerated guest speakers and exchanged letters with women held at the Central California Women’s Facility in Chowchilla. We read the writing of abolitionists and prison reformers, California Department of Corrections Rehabilitation correctional officers and undercover reporters investigating private prisons. No matter how much talking and reading we did, nothing could have prepared me for the experience of going inside.
California’s “Scandinavian-style” prison model — hailed by Governor Gavin Newsom as the future of criminal justice — sells the illusion that we can humanize mass incarceration. We can’t. A system built on isolation and control cannot, by definition, become a place of healing. Rebranding to rehabilitation promises transformation, but as I walked through its gates and onto the yard, I realized how misleading that promise is. You can paint the walls softer colors, add a few career-training programs and teach improv classes, but at the end of the day, you’re still putting people inside a cage.
If California truly wants to reduce crime and create the conditions for safety, it should stop investing millions in “rehabilitative” prisons and start investing in restorative justice programs in our communities instead.
To do that, we need to first reevaluate our idea of what we consider “justice” to be. Is serving justice oriented around providing peace of mind to victims of violent crime, or is it about ensuring the continued suffering of those who caused harm to others? If we define justice as repair, then we can start to understand how incarceration has become the biggest obstacle to healing rather than a path toward it.
For decades, both political parties have treated imprisonment as the default response to social problems that are, at their core, economic, medical or psychological. “Crime” is a boogie man they can point fingers at rather than address the root of injustice and truly break cycles of violence plaguing communities in all parts of our country. The result? We incarcerate nearly 2 million people — more than any nation on Earth.
If prisons truly made us safer, we would see a clear, consistent relationship between incarceration and crime reduction. We don’t. The Vera Institute of Justice notes that long prison sentences “don’t actually improve safety,” as they do little to deter reoffending and even increase rates of recidivism. At least 1 in 4 people who go to prison will be arrested again within the same year.
Despite this pattern, California continues to spend over $130,000 per incarcerated person each year. Community-based restorative programs, which could prevent people from getting caught up into the cycle of incarceration, operate on a fraction of that budget.
When we equate crime to harm, we can begin reorienting our thinking around healing rather than punishment. This serves victims and the perpetrators of violence, breaking cycles of pain on both sides.
Danielle Sered, a restorative justice advocate and author argues in her essay “Across the River of Fire,” that “we have confused accountability with punishment.” Her organization, Common Justice, offers an alternative path, bringing victims, offenders and community members together to address harm directly.
Participants acknowledge what they did, make amends and take concrete steps towards repairing the damage. When offered, victims of crime chose this route over traditional prosecution 90 percent of the time. Fewer than 7 percent of participants are rearrested within two years. That’s a fraction of the national recidivism rate.
The next time I visited San Quentin, I volunteered as a member of Kid C.A.T., a restorative justice group “addressing conflict, and disrupting cycles of harm through relationship.” On my visit, we each shared a memory from elementary school. Nearly everyone had a story that began with loss. They spoke of abusive parents, mothers caught up in addiction, fathers deported or siblings killed. One man told us he hadn’t seen his mother since he was two. Most of his life outside was spent battling drug addiction and mental health struggles, until he was incarcerated at the age of 18. He then spent years in prison working his way down from a level four high security penitentiary through programming and “good behavior.”
The men I met that day are fathers, sons and friends. They are artists, singers and profoundly talented Shakespeare actors —we were lucky enough to get a preview of the first act of “Titus Andronicus” during one visit. Many spoke about how they had never been asked to process their emotions before prison, and it took them time and reflection to accept that they should once they got here.
At first, I felt an immense sense of pride for these men, who — despite being sucked into a system that gives them every reason to give up hope — did the hard work of engaging with therapy, community and educational programming on the inside.
So, if we want more programming, why not just pump more funding into prisons? There are two main issues with this well-intentioned question:
First, these types of programs can be transformative, but they’re not accessible to everyone. There are long waitlists and strict eligibility rules that privilege those who are set to be released within the same year. Outside of San Quentin, many of these programs don’t even exist.
Higher security prisons like Salinas Valley Prison, a level-four penitentiary just two hours south of San Quentin, are more typical for the national average. Their programming is often limited to Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous and faith-based groups — while therapeutic programs, trauma-informed education and peer-led circles for healing are nonexistent.
These institutions are racially segregated, subject to frequent lockdowns, far from populated areas and positioned in conservative parts of the Central Valley, leading to limited community engagement for volunteer work. This all creates the conditions for further isolation, leaving residents in their cells without access to any programming or interpersonal connection at all. To that end, it becomes clear that people want to participate; they just can’t, even when they do everything they can to seek it out.
Second, and most importantly, why should individuals have to be traumatized and dehumanized in prison, spend years working their way down from high level penitentiaries and get onto exclusive lists just to begin to receive access to necessary human care?
While the impulse to redirect funding into reform is understandable, it often serves to expand incarceration, creating new prison industries, new detention centers and new justifications for confinement. True reform must begin by pushing to reduce our carceral footprint.
Giving prison a flashy and modernized look only allows us to temporarily forget why we have these massive detention centers in the first place, and wash our hands clean of the implications and aftermath of incarceration.
Rahsaan “New York” Thomas, an incarcerated journalist and co-host of the award-winning “Ear Hustle” podcast, was sentenced to 55-to-life for second-degree murder. While at San Quentin, Thomas became a writer, mentor and advocate.
His article “What Did You Just Call Me?” exposes the flaws in California’s “rehabilitative” rebrand. We can’t humanize a system built on dehumanization. Programs like “Ear Hustle“ have given people like Thomas a voice, but he achieved transformation despite prison, not because of it. His story proves that growth, creativity and accountability flourish when people are trusted with agency — not when they’re trapped in a system that defines them by their worst act.
Public safety cannot rest on perpetual punishment. It can only be a result of fundamental values centering prevention, equity and care. The moral test of a society is not how many people it can imprison, but how few it needs to.
Leili Kamali PO ’29 is a volunteer editor with “The Beat Within Magazine,” a publication disseminating the writing of incarcerated individuals across prisons and juvenile detention centers.
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