In 2015, I toured San Quentin prison. It wasn’t a distant, point-things-out-from-the-safety-of-a-tour-bus type of experience. We spent four hours amongst the men with no bars or walls between us, talking to some of them, seeing just about every part of the facility. Except the Adjustment Center, a haunting place with a haunting historical name that houses damaged human beings dangerous to the other inmates. 

It was a life-changing experience.

I wrote about that day right after we went but—old story—have never shared that writing. Here is the first part of it now, newly edited. The continuations (on other days), is new writing.

A Day in San Quentin

A Place Where Men Live, All Kinds of Men

The day after visiting San Quentin Prison, nothing seemed real. My life was a Disney backdrop in contrast to what I had seen.

My father-in-law Bob had arranged the tour. One day while out in Marin County for business, he had stopped to check out the San Quentin Prison Gift Shop, something he had heard about from an associate. You can buy crafts there made by the inmates, clocks, paper weights, music boxes, along with the fare of any souvenir shop, t-shirts, coffee mugs and shot glasses featuring illustrations of the notorious bayside prison or humorous sayings about being in the slammer. According to the Atlas Obscura website, “roughly half of the 750 people currently on death row at San Quentin participate in the prison’s Hobby Program.”

The revenue pays for their art supplies or sundry items or can be sent home to family. “A portion of their sales go into the General Inmate Fund, which pays for things like movies and other forms of entertainment for the general population.” It can also help prisoners pay their restitution, a debt that can take decades to pay. 

While there, Bob saw a group of people gathered, listening as someone described San Quentin’s history. Inquiring, he found out that, with security clearance, he and others could take a guided tour inside the prison. He booked a tour for himself, my husband, my sister-in-law and me.

When the day rolled around, I was absolutely committed and beyond curious, but nervous. There was an intense dress code sent to us ahead of time: no denim, no blue, no gray, no orange, no white, no sweatpants or sweatshirts; essentially you could wear no colors or materials that made you resemble a prisoner. No open-toed shoes, no tank tops, no revealing clothing, no skirts above the knee, no cell phone, no purse. I took great pains to dress appropriately, reviewing the list multiple times.

Honestly, I was scared. My perception was that I was about to knowingly walk into a cage full of predators. As a woman growing up long before the Me-Too movement, I knew predatory stares, words and actions. I had been a victim, like so many women, feeling like I deserved some of the blame, that it was just “how things were,” and all I could do was survive it, learn from it, protect myself, move on. But as a writer, I was not about to pass up the opportunity to see the “world behind bars” first hand. 

How many times had I crossed the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge and wondered at that foreboding cement fortress, at what and who was within. Some of the country’s most notorious criminals had cells there, serial killers, rapists, murderers. Ironically, San Quentin sits on waterfront property that any developer would drool over, surrounded by one of the wealthiest areas in the nation. 

The morning of the tour, when I told a couple other parents on my children’s school blacktop about the adventure I was about to take, they just asked, “Why? Why would you do that?” This became the most common question even after returning from the tour too. “Why?”

I couldn’t blame them. Think of how prison is portrayed in movies, in the news, and how crime and criminals fill our imagination and trigger fear in our society. Fear sells. I was right there with them wondering, in Hollywood terms: what horrors would I see within? I imagined being in a hostage situation. Would I have to endure threats, lude remarks, lingering predatory glances that I’d replay in my head for weeks, months or years? I’m susceptible to such things, having a vivid imagination. After I saw the movie Jaws at 10 years old, swimming felt perilous. I distrusted even swimming pools for years. 

As we drove toward the prison that morning, I felt tremendously vulnerable. But my curiosity won out. I wanted to see San Quentin for myself.  Besides, they must keep the visitors safe. We actually didn’t expect to see that much or get that near to the inmates. We figured the tour, with tight security, would last an hour or so and involve mostly hearing facts in some office somewhere. We had no idea how much more it would be.

Once in the parking lot, the prison a short walk away, a grounds guard asked if we had a picture ID. We would not be allowed inside without one. I had been so anxious, so focused on the dress code that I had left my purse at home. Luckily, we had arrived early. I drove all the way home to Oakland—the traffic in my favor—returning just as my group was entering the prison. 

The gate guardsman seemed glad I made it back. He got on the phone. “They just went inside. Go!”

I walked quickly past the large employee parking lot, the lapping bay on my left and several small, old buildings on my right. At the entrance, standing by myself, I showed a guard my ID, signed in, had my hand stamped with UV light-activated invisible ink—“Your ticket out of here,” I was told—and pushed open a thick metal door per instructions. I had to close it behind me before the guard would buzz me through another. I entered a courtyard, and I was inside San Quentin Prison. 

At first glance it could have been anywhere. The courtyard was bathed in sunlight. There were a few small areas of landscaping with mature plants and trees, a lawn responsibly browned from the drought but well-tended, a raised circular pond with a fountain, currently empty and shut off. People were strolling alone or in pairs chatting, moving from one building to another, men and women, a few in uniform, most not. It could have been a corporate campus. Except for the bars on the windows. The impenetrable walls that surrounded us.

I joined the group. My husband and his sister had purposefully asked lots of questions in the Q&A to stall for me, and we listened in the heat of the sun as Information Officer, Lieutenant Sam Robinson, a longtime San Quentin employee, having served ten years as a sergeant of the guards on death row, described where we stood. A short brick pathway on the lawn to our left memorialized officers and employees killed by inmates with plaques bearing the names of the fallen. The location of this memorial garden was no coincidence. Behind it was a three-story beige building with barred windows known as the Adjustment Center. “In there,” said Sam, “are the worst of the worst.” 

The Adjustment Center housed about 100 inmates on death row and prisoners too dangerous, too disruptive to mix with the other 3,000 inmates. David Carpenter, the Trailside Killer, serial killer Charles Ng, and Scott Peterson were among the residents held there, separated at all times from other prisoners. They could talk through their cell doors across the hallway, but they ate, exercised, slept and lived alone. Leaders of the prison system’s powerful gangs lived there too, bosses of the Black Guerrilla Family, the Aryan Brotherhood—both started at San Quentin in the 1960s, and the Mexican Mafia, which also took its stronghold at San Quentin in the early ’60’s and has a complicated history with splitting factions and rival groups.

When I first arrived for the tour, there were shouts in the distance, rising and falling as if at a sports match. Sam explained that what we heard were members of the Mexican Mafia. Each isolated in a separate exercise pen, 10 feet by 10 feet, they were doing synchronized pushups, burpees and jumping jacks, counting in unison to show their solidarity and intimidate other inmates.

Even well-maintained, it was a creepy building. The name, The Adjustment Center, was painted in a pretty roman script over the caged entrance. The name seems a reminder of a past when guards could attempt to “adjust” prisoners with beatings, confinement, anything that might subdue a “hardened criminal.” This sort of torture was deemed as a “tool” up through the 1930s and though beatings are no longer tolerated, the confinement remains. However, the Adjustment Center was built in 1960. 

Anyone entering the Adjustment Center requires advanced security clearance. Sam told us this was the one building we would not enter on the tour.