Remaking San Quentin Prison to Emphasize Rehabilitation

In March 2023, California Governor Gavin Newsom used a visit to San Quentin State Prison, California’s oldest prison and once home to a gas chamber used to execute inmates on the nation’s largest death row, to announce a plan to overhaul the facility in favor of a rehabilitation-centered approach that could become a model for the world. The facility will be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center and the more than 500 inmates serving death sentences there will be moved elsewhere in the California penitentiary system. The prison houses more than 2,000 other inmates on lesser sentences.

“We want to be the preeminent restorative justice facility in the world. That’s the goal,” Newsom said from an on-site warehouse that will house his envisioned programs. “San Quentin is iconic, San Quentin is known worldwide. If San Quentin can do it, it can be done anywhere else.”

A group made up of public safety experts, crime victims and formerly incarcerated people will advise the state on the transformation, which Newsom hopes to complete by 2025. He is allocating $20 million to launch the plan.

This effort is included as part of a decades-long transformation of the state’s sprawling prison system, which went under federal receivership in 2005 after a court determined prison medical care was so lacking it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. A panel of judges later ordered the state to dramatically reduce the prison population because of overcrowding.

Newsom’s office cited as a model Norway’s approach to incarceration, which focuses on preparing people to return to society. Officials from the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation toured Norwegian prisons in 2019, where they took note of the positive interactions between inmates and staff. Oregon and North Dakota have also taken inspiration from the Scandinavian country’s policies. In maximum-security Norwegian prisons, cells often look more like dorm rooms with additional furniture such as chairs, desks, even TVs, and prisoners have kitchen access. Norway has a low rate of people who reoffend after leaving prison.

To read more about the plan to transform San Quentin and it's role in the reimagining of California's criminal justice approach, read "Gavin Newsom moves to ‘transform’ San Quentin as California prison population shrinks" at Cal Matters, a nonpartisan and nonprofit news organization bringing Californians stories that probe, explain and explore solutions to quality of life issues while holding state leaders accountable.