Reeling from the personal narratives of the inmates, from the scary and imposing impressions of the Adjustment Center and more positive but equally humbling sights of the hospital, we left the building and followed Sam to the San Quentin “Dungeons.” 

Located almost directly below the prison hospital was a decaying rock and clay-brick structure built by incarcerated people at the prison in 1854. It was used for solitary confinement until the 1940s and preserved as a historic site, “a relic of San Quentin’s punitive and barbaric past.”

Built four years after California became a state, says state historian Kevin Starr in a CrimeReporter.org article, the original San Quentin prison and these dungeons were “the state's first public work, before the Capitol building, the roadways, the public colleges and universities.” A disheartening fact, prisons before schools. Again.

The first prison was built out of local rock and clay brick, the cells sealed with iron doors with a small slit known as a “Judas hole.” The rock was quarried by convicts living aboard a prison ship anchored in the San Francisco Bay. The building was intended to house 45 inmates. More than 150 men were piled into the cells, not unlike the crowding we saw at San Quentin when we were there when it was at 3x the capacity. 

We heard how floggings with a rawhide strap were standard punishment, along with “shower baths,” a precursor of water-boarding.

It was cold and damp inside the dungeons, their walls chipped from age. For one pitch black, isolating and terrifying moment, our guide closed the door behind us. All senses were dulled except fear. If I’m remembering correctly there were bars across the top of a few of the cells from which prisoners could be hung by their hands. There were chains for shackles on the walls. I had only seen such things before in medieval castles in Europe.

It reminded me that life in the past was cheaper than today, but inhumanity is still far too common an occurrence, perpetrated by powerful and extreme leaders and misguided individuals demonizing “the other,” inside our prisons, on the streets, in oppressed neighborhoods and dysfunctional homes where people experience the damaging factors that lead them to these prisons.

From the dungeons, we followed Sam back into welcoming sunshine towards the main exercise grounds where we would learn even more about prison culture and the system of segregation that exists within.

(Continued in 100 Day Challenge #59)