After three decades of incarceration Noel Valdivia Sr. left San Quentin a free man on July 8. I met Noey on a beautiful spring day in 2002 as we were running laps on the track. After I passed him for the third or fourth time I said, “It never gets easier, does it?”
Since then I worked with him in the Sheet Metal Shop, participating in numerous groups such as Trust, Impact and college classes. I played baseball with him several seasons, and we lived as “next door” neighbors for several years. His odyssey of incarceration began as a teenager on the hard streets of Stockton, where he fell in with a rough crowd and began experimenting with drugs and alcohol. That led to a murder.
Noey admitted what he did, signed the dotted line for guilty and went to prison for 25 years to life.
One thing about Noey that anyone who knows him will tell you, he was a fierce litigator. He spent much of his free time in the Law Library fighting for his freedom. The Parole Board never found Noey suitable for release, always concluding that he would pose “an unreasonable risk of danger to society” if released. Noey appealed these findings and ultimately had the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals order his release with no parole.
The beauty of Noey as a person and litigator is that he helped others with their appeals. There is a long list of people he got out. He never said “no” when asked for help. There were guys at his door all day and everyday asking for legal help. Another thing about Noey is that he had this ridiculously inappropriate optimism. Living next door to him I would be laying there late at night and hear him laughing, all the time. I would say to my roommate, “What’s up with that dude?” After all these years of being locked up, no end in sight, enduring decades of oppression, he always laughed. Now that he’s gone I miss the sound of that laughter.
When told there would be only one baseball team this year, thereby excluding dozens of people, he organized a second team. People often refer to Noey’s squad as the “B” team or “second” team, yet in head-to-head competition against the Giants, the B team is up two games on the A team.
Noey is also a family man. He has a son, a daughter and grandchildren whom he loves dearly. The last visit Noey had I recall looking at him sitting next to his 80-something-year-old mother. She was in a wheelchair, holding on for dear life until her son came home, and she had the most beautiful smile. She held on. Noey is home with his family.
Noted Crusader Passes On
Dr. John Irwin passed away at his home in San Francisco on January 3 at the age of 80. A memorial service was held in The Garden Chapel on February 19 to honor his memory and celebrate an accomplished life of a true pioneer and frontline soldier in the struggle for justice.
For those of us fortunate to know and work with Dr. Irwin, he will always serve as an example of what can be achieved by an “ex-con.” John Irwin did not hide from his past; instead he embraced it while using his status as a convicted felon to carve out his own niche in academia, teaching for 27 years at San Francisco State University after earning degrees at UCLA and UC Berkeley. In criminology circles Dr. Irwin is referred to as the Godfather of Convict Criminology in a field of academia consisting exclusively of ex-cons.
I personally became familiar with Dr. Irwin in the late 1990s through my parents’ work on prison reform. When I first heard of this person who was a former prisoner that had accomplished so much I became inspired to pursue a path of education. I was very fortunate to land at San Quentin where I had the opportunity to earn a college degree, and also meet John Irwin.
The educational opportunities that were afforded him as a prisoner were no longer available to prisoners. With the elimination of Pell Grant funding for prisoners in 1994, post-secondary education in prisons essentially came to a halt. Another issue that troubled John was the plight of lifers; that is, indeterminately sentenced prisoners being incarcerated arbitrarily past their eligible release dates for up to decades. This issue was so important to John that his final published work was a book titled “Lifers.”
John was not only interested in helping prisoners. My work with him revolved around educating the public, who John considered the true victims of our current criminal justice system. John would coordinate with university colleagues to bring in classes of students studying criminal justice, criminology, law students, and just about anyone he could get in.
A group of us prisoners would talk with the students. These meetings were not random casual discussions; they were highly organized by John with each prisoner having a role and points to hit on. If we were not on our game John would let us know. Dr. Irwin recognized the importance of communicating to students why their tuition kept getting raised each year while services were being cut. John hammered to us the cause and affect of California’s draconian criminal justice policies and then had us pass along these truths.
Along with John’s advocacy work, he was a family man with a wife, two daughters and a son. He would often share details of his life, vacations he would take, places he had been and activities he enjoyed. I shared with John a love of surfing and would frequently take pleasure in the stories he told of big waves and tropical beaches. So as John takes that last long paddle out it becomes our duty to pick up the torch he carried.