California wants to erase the black legend of San Quentin

The entrance to the San Quentin prison, in California (USA), on June 29, 2020. Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)

On January 1, 1959, Johnny Cash visited San Quentin State Prison, north of San Francisco, to give the first of his famous prison concerts.

The man in black, as the musician who died in 2003 was known, played a dozen songs for hundreds of inmates in the workshop, a space where inmates made objects to later sell for a few dollars.

“San Quentin, I hate every inch of you,” Cash sang, drawing an explosion of jubilation from the audience.

At that concert, Merle Haggard was in the audience, then a 20-year-old who was serving a sentence for robbery.

Haggard was transformed by that display of arrogance and pace.

It was a glimpse of the future that he could aspire to without a life as a criminal.

In freedom he became that,

That founding legend of American country indicates one of the moments of renewal that has taken place within the walls of San Quentin, a penitentiary opened in 1852 that today overlooks San Francisco Bay.

It takes its name from an Indian chief who was captured by Mexican soldiers.

The education and rehabilitation programs, however, began in 1940. California Governor Gavin Newsom intends to change the history of this detention center, which today houses around 550 people on death row.

California has a particular relationship with the death penalty.

It has not executed anyone since 2006. In 2016, however, Californians voted in a referendum that they wanted to keep and use capital punishment more.

In 2019,

“We took another step in the search for true rehabilitation, justice and safer communities,” Newsom said Thursday afternoon.

The president envisions a new model for the prison that has housed criminals such as Charles Manson, who died in 2017, and William Bonin, a serial rapist and murderer of at least 14 boys, who was executed in 1996 with the first lethal injection given in the prison. State.

The governor assures that the new project aims to become a national rehabilitation model and "break the cycles of crime" that make 45% of people commit a crime again in the first three years after being released.

The first step?

Let San Quentin be a maximum security prison.

All the inmates who are there will be transferred to other centers.

The famous photograph of Jim Marshall, who captured Johnny Cash at the second San Quentin concert, in 1969.Jim Marshall

The new initiative will be ready in 2025. It will be then when the compound will be transformed into a place where an inmate will spend the last stage of his sentence.

There the inmates will be able to train to have a well-paid job once they are released.

Plumbers, electricians or trailer drivers will be trained, a trade that each year has nearly 80,000 without coverage throughout the country.

Newsom promises that his project will be huge, despite the fact that he has only allocated $20 million to start the prison conversion in his budget.

The governor, one of the most well-known Democratic politicians in the country, assures that he has been inspired by the reintegration model in Norway, where three out of four ex-convicts do not reoffend.

It's not the only effort of the kind.

There are prisons in North Dakota and Oregon that have followed Scandinavian examples.

In the United States, the demand for prison reform has been increasing in recent years due to its excessive punishment of black and Latino populations.

Inside San Quintín there is a small museum with the history of the center.

There you can see the blood-stained knot used in the last execution by hanging, in 1937. Decades later, in 1971, the prison experienced one of its most violent days.

A group of six inmates tried to escape, sparking a riot in which three guards and three prisoners were killed.

Hugo Pinell, one of the inmates who tried to escape, of Nicaraguan origin, was changed prison shortly after.

He was stabbed to death in another Sacramento jail, where he was serving six death sentences for murder, rape and aggravated assault.

Most of the crimes committed were behind bars.

In San Quentin those sentenced to death live in a solitary cell.

A few years ago they were allowed to keep knitting needles in their rooms.

In the workshop, the place where Cash offered his concert, quilts and dolls made by the inhabitants of the prison are sold.

But the center is also known for having implemented some advanced policies to reintegrate prisoners into society.

There is the Monte Tamalpais University, the only educational center inside a prison that offers two years of higher education and classes on literature, astronomy and art.

This is funded by Stanford and Berkeley universities.

It has also become a pilgrimage site for any type of cultural project.

In 2017, three inmates launched

, which became the first podcast in the United States made from prison.

The audio program was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Decades earlier, in the 1960s, writer Truman Capote, famous for making a visit to death row in Kansas a literary masterpiece, came to make a documentary for the television on the death penalty.

In 2019 another prominent documentarian, Ken Burns, visited her to screen his research on country.

Merle Haggard and Johnny Cash returned to the legend of San Quentin.

The material was appreciated by inmates who were already behind bars on the man in black's first visit.

Truman Capote is checked by a guard at San Quentin prison, where he went to make a documentary for television in the 1960s.