Sam and our tour guide inmates led us to the “housing units” beyond the exercise yard. Other than the maximum-security Adjustment Center, housing in San Quentin consists of four large cell blocks, West, South, North, and East Block. I can’t remember which we entered, but it was where Clay “lived.” 

Before touring San Quentin, I had been inside two other prisons. Seeing Alcatraz as a tourist reinforced the movie stereotype of dank cement cells with bars. In the early 80s while in high school, I visited Santa Rita Prison in Dublin. I accompanied a high school acquaintance whose sister worked there as a guard. He offered to take a bunch of us. I was the only person who eagerly said yes, curious about this “other world.” At that time, Santa Rita was fairly small—though overcrowded—and housed mostly women. If I’m remembering correctly, it was high-security for women, and Squeaky Fromme was there. I only saw one small part of the facility, a housing unit. It was fairly clean and looked nothing like Alcatraz. My memory is a little vague now, but I remember being in a central indoor area of a single story-building, shaped like a dodecagon. On each of the sides were cells behind regular-looking doors, only they were very solid with a narrow, small, thick glass window, the size of an arrowslit (balistraria) in an old castle. (Soon after my visit, Santa Rita was expanded to become one of the largest prisons in California, became co-ed—although it might’ve been already—and conditions, according to online reports, are questionable.)

I didn’t know what to expect at San Quentin. 

We entered the block. It was immediately depressing. 

And more like Alcatraz.

Rising up to the ceiling was five stories of wall-to-wall cells. Each floor had a railed walkway along the cells. The entrance to each cell was thick mesh wire and bars. They were cages. It reminded me of the chinchilla cages that I cleaned for a breeder when I was fourteen. Only there were men inside of these. It was stuffy and stale inside the block, the air cool but not well-ventilated.

A guard opened a cell on the first level, Clay’s cell that he shared with another inmate. Clay was a big guy, six-foot-three or so. His cell was tiny. All of the cells in the blocks are only four and a half feet wide by ten feet, eight inches long, not much bigger than many closets.

There were two bunkbeds against the wall, a sink and a toilet in the back. Above the toilet were shelves with the men’s personal items, deodorant and soap, books, spices and coffee creamer, medicines, paper and pens. Clothes hung on the wall opposite the beds. They utilized the space in front of the bars beside the door too, with a small TV and small shelves with more clothes and personal possessions. Clay had many pictures and photographs on the wall by his bunk. He had occupied this cell for a while and, like our homes, it had an accumulation of things. His cellmate changed now and then, so most of the items we saw inside were Clay’s.

He welcomed us to step inside his “home.” 

My breath felt short, the confinement compressive. Two people couldn’t walk from one side of the cell to the other at the same time. 

I was very aware that the men here had broken the law in some way. Some had even killed. But at the same time, this constriction, this caged existence didn’t feel right for any human being. And a lot of these guys had been living like this now for twenty, thirty years or more. 

I wanted to get out of that place.

What a fortune there is in freedom!

Back outside, we entered an adjacent building, the South Dining Hall. There were two eating areas: The South and North Dining Halls. 

Instead of the long tables you see in Shawshank Redemption (which is what San Quentin’s dining looked like back in the early 20th century), the room was crowded with four-top, pre-fab tables you might see at a school, with attached little round seats.

The inmates told us how it got pretty old sometimes eating the same food over and over. For daily fruit, they usually received an apple. When they got a shipment of peaches a few months back, it was a celebration. Clay said he hadn’t tasted anything as good as that peach. The inmates put in requests for certain food items, but they didn’t always come.

There was an intricate mural covering one entire wall of the cafeteria. It was twelve feet high by 100 feet long all in muted sepia tones. It depicted California’s history and popular culture in the first half of the 20th century. A drawing of an Indian village and the Franciscan missionary Junípero Serra was not far from a caricature of Groucho Marx. It was a fascinating hodgepodge of covered wagons and rodeos, football games and flamenco dancers. There was an oil well gushing from a huge human arm and hog carcasses dangling from the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

The style and subject of the mural changed from one end of the room to the other, starting off somewhat utilitarian, WPA-mural-style on one end and becoming dreamlike and expressionistic on the other. 

The artist was Alfredo Santos. He arrived at San Quentin in 1951 at the age of 24, having received a sentence of four years for heroin possession. Alfredo had taken art in high school until he was expelled from 10th grade for striking a teacher. 

According to a 2007 New York Times article, he read books voraciously once in prison and starting drawing portraits of other inmates and of their family members from photos. They paid him in cigarettes. 

“San Quentin is where I became an artist,” said Alfredo.

In 1953, he submitted the winning sketch in a competition among the inmates to paint this mural. According to the article and what Sam explained to us, “After inexplicably being denied the use of other colors, he began to apply thinned, raw sienna oil paint directly to plaster. Before long the warden ordered Mr. Santos to paint all three double-sided walls in the dining area.”

He painted the mural over two years at night under guard with two other inmates who took care of the scaffolding.  

“Sometimes I painted for a couple of hours, and sometimes I kept at it until sunrise,” he said. “They let me go at my own pace.”

Alfredo rushed to finish the mural at the end before his parole.

After his release, he worked as a caricaturist at Disneyland before opening up his own studio and gallery in San Diego. He fled to Mexico after being arrested for possession of marijuana and worked as an artist and studio owner there for another ten years. From 1967 until 1987, he ran a popular gallery and bohemian gathering spot in Fleischmanns, N.Y., up in the Catskills, then moved back to San Diego. 

In researching for this story, I learned that he passed away the same year we toured San Quentin, 2015.

Sam and the inmates seemed proud of the mural. Alfredo had created it—in part—to entertain the men. They appreciated it. It also was further evidence of the humanity and potential inside the prison. I felt it too. It was inspiring.

We were well into hour-four inside the prison, and I was emotionally exhausted. But, we had one more stop on the San Quentin tour after that. The death chamber.