As we left the cafeteria, we had to say good-bye to our new acquaintances, the inmates who had told us their stories, escorted us through the yard and shown us their tiny cells with their few belongings. They couldn’t go where we were headed next, nor did they want to. Our final stop on the tour of San Quentin was the death chamber.

Sam took us around the side of the cell block that housed most of the death row inmates, those not in the Adjustment Center. There were about 700 of them. 

I had been scared to see this part of the prison even before we arrived at San Quentin. My stomach hurt in anticipation of seeing a place where human beings could legally and systematically kill other human beings.

It turned out that there were two death chambers. Sam took us to see the oldest one first. Contained in a room with dark green linoleum floors and walls painted a peach color was a sealable contraption that looked like some sort of 1950s-movie deep-sea submersible. Adding to this impression was its paint color, a light aqua green and the captain’s wheel on the thick metal door used to lock it. Inside were two angular, blocky chairs with straps on the arms. On all sides of the chamber were thick-glassed windows. Opposite the door, chairs were arranged in a semi-circle facing the windows. 

This had originally been the gas chamber, which is why the walls, windows and door were so solid. It had been built in 1937 when the California State Legislature replaced hanging as the method of capital punishment with lethal gas. Up until 1967, 194 people—including four women—were executed by gas at San Quentin. It was last used to asphyxiate an individual on August 24, 1993. 

According to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), court decisions in 1967—when the ethics of the death penalty were being questioned in earnest—halted execution in California for 25 years. Although the death penalty was reinstated in 1978, executions did not resume in California until April 21, 1992. But they did resume. Why the 1990s I found myself asking?

When the use of cyanide gas was ruled cruel and unusual punishment, the penal system turned to lethal injection. The clunky chairs were replaced with a padded gurney upon which the condemned man would lie down. 

The last two executions in that awful, tiny room were of Stanley “Tookie” Williams in 2005 and Clarence Ray Allen in 2006. Allen was 76 years old, the second-oldest inmate ever to be officially executed in the United States. Many people questioned at the time: what was the point of executing an old man?

Tookie Williams, though convicted of murder of four people, always maintained his innocence for that particular crime. He was the co-founder and an early leader of the Crips street gang in Los Angeles. Tookie claimed he originally organized the Crips not with the intention of eliminating other gangs, but “to create a force powerful enough to protect local black people from racism, corruption and brutality at the hands of the police.” Indeed, the name Crips stood for “Community Revolution in Progress.” He tried to unite all the territorial gangs in LA, but those gangs that resisted losing their independence formed their own unity, the Bloods. 

Perhaps not knowing any other way, the leaders of the rival gangs used force and violence to try to create fear in each other and in the innocent people that lived around them. The violence escalated when the use of drugs became commonplace. 

In prison, Tookie—with a co-author—wrote numerous books, most of them for young people, and became an advocate for ending gang warfare in the lives of inner-city children. He recorded a heart-felt plea for peace shown at the Crips-Blood Summit in 2000. He started the Internet Project for Street Peace, which arranged for at-risk youths in California and South Africa to communicate with each other via email and online chat groups. 

As a result, Williams was nominated six times for the Nobel Peace Prize and received the President’s Call to Service Award in 2005.

He was up for a Nobel and execution at the same time.

At his funeral, a tape recorder played the last words of Williams to mourners.

“The war within me is over. I battled my demons and I was triumphant. Teach them how to avoid our destructive footsteps. Teach them to strive for higher education. Teach them to promote peace and teach them to focus on rebuilding the neighborhoods that you, others, and I helped to destroy.”

Tookie’s son, a father, home-owner, and reformed gang member working in social services, and rapper Snoop Dog both spoke at the service.

Why isn’t the redemption and rehabilitation of inmates more of a consideration? In their parole and release? In their sentencing?

Tookie openly admitted to a lot of heinous behavior. But while the evidence around the four murders is murky, there is a lot of evidence of the regret, evolved moral stance, education and rehabilitation he experienced while he served at San Quentin—including nine books.

From the gas chamber, Sam took us next door into a non-descript and windowless white building that contained another death chamber. This was the Lethal Injection Facility. It was sterile white except for the padded gurney—in that awful aqua green color—with numerous straps and buckles. It had been moved here from the old death chamber. On either side of the gurney, were surgical procedure tables and trays. There was a long picture window separating us from this scene. We were in the area reserved for the media. To both the right and left of the procedure room were smaller windows and viewing rooms, for the victim’s family on the left; for the condemned man’s family on the right. They could each look past the execution and see each other. 

Behind the room was the “control center” where the execution team could create the lethal cocktail. The center had four phones each with direct lines to the governor’s office, the state Supreme Court, the attorney general and the warden.

“The phones are connected to all those entities to make sure the inmates’ legal rights are upheld,” Sam said.

But this facility, completed in 2008 and costing $835,000, had never been used. 

In 2006, United States District Judge Fogel put a moratorium on executions in California and ordered prison officials to improve procedures for administering lethal injections. Evidence showed that inexperienced, untrained prison staff were carrying out the executions in crowded, poorly lit settings, making the system “broken.” This room was built in response. 

When it was to be used for the first time in 2010, Fogel ordered a stay on the execution. He wrote in a 2011 editorial in the New York Times: 

“For legislators in state capitols considering whether to abolish the [death] penalty... this case... has documented how lethal injection can be cruel and unusual punishment when unprofessionally administered and how the culture of prisons breeds that shoddy approach. It is one more reason to reject the death penalty as a barbaric punishment.”

When we were in San Quentin in 2015, there was a chance that the moratorium would be lifted and executions resumed. 

Four years after my visit to San Quentin, in 2019, Governor Gavin Newsom ordered a moratorium on the state's death penalty. Within hours, a sign was posted on the heavy metal door to the death chamber that read: “Gas Chamber CLOSED per Executive Order 11-09-19.” 

On March 13th, prison inmate volunteers and CDCR representatives helped to dismantle both the gas and lethal injection execution chambers. I can only imagine what that must have felt like for the inmates.

I, for one, was happy to hear this. I get the emotions behind the death penalty, the passion for revenge. I can imagine—though I don’t wish to—the desire for payment of the person’s life who takes the life of someone you love. The bereaved seek closure. I would never invalidate those feelings ever. But grief doesn’t go away. It just changes form and intensity over the years. 

This is a sensitive topic, I know, because it is an emotional one. So I will only speak for myself. I highly value education and forgiveness. I know sitting in judgment of others is not good for me. It makes me unhappy. What I seek from criminals is remorse, comprehension of their action’s consequences, self-responsibility, education, a genuine and lasting change of moral character. I would want the ultimate serving for a crime to be in the form of service to others, to the community, to humanity. 

A very difficult question is how to treat mentally-ill criminals incapable of change because of the make-up of their brains, those that suffer, for example, from sociopathy and psychopathy? That’s a whole other topic: our lack of systems and support and facilities to help the mentally ill and their families. 

There was so much to think about and feel as we left the death chambers. We were all overwhelmed I think. 

Sam escorted us back to the menacing, guarded entrance to the prison. We thanked him profusely and, after being padded down for contraband, stepped out into the sunlight with the sparkling bay right in front of us, seagulls staring at us from the rocks along the shore. We walked through the parking lot to our cars, these machines that we owned that could take us anywhere we wanted to go. We could barely speak, exhausted after an intense four hours and with so much to digest.

I thought of the men we met inside who had achieved high school and college diplomas in prison and would hopefully someday be released. How would they survive, given $200 and little else upon their release? Would the volunteers and nonprofits—like BOSS—provide enough support as they transition to life on the outside? With their records, would they be able to get and keep jobs and homes? To find love?

Since our tour in 2015, thousands of California inmates have been released. San Quentin, with over 4,000 men when we were there, now has a population of around 2,000. Have Clay and Wall Street and the others been released? I wonder how they are doing.

San Quentin isn’t just a guarded wall around predators. There were some men inside, I’m sure, that—for one reason or another—hadn’t or couldn’t reform. But the vast majority of inmates in San Quentin were people who had made terrible mistakes, mostly when they were young. They were human beings.

The state decided pre-Covid that it was time to close down at least two of the prisons in California as an effort to stop the wide and inequitable incarceration in the state. The 67-year-old Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy was the first to close. San Quentin is on the short list for the next closure. With all the volunteer services provided in San Quentin because of its location in the Bay Area and near so many universities and resources, many people think this is unwise, that another prison would be a better choice. I can’t help but wonder—in this strange and corporate-driven day and age, with the widening gap between rich and poor—how much of a factor will the incredible value of this waterside property be in the final decision. We’ll see what happens.

I don’t want it to sound cliché saying that my day in San Quentin was life-changing. But it was. It truly was.

The day after the tour, and for weeks after, the colors of the leaves in the trees and flowers were technicolor bright. I took walks, breathing in the air and considering freedom, how precious it is. I don’t think I can ever take it for granted again. I looked around in wonder at our home, our children, our cat, all our possessions. I felt wonder that I could contemplate, “What should I do next today?” 

All of these things are amazing treasures. Space. Choices. Love. Freedom.