Knocking down one of the nation’s oldest prison walls leaves behind more than a mountain of rubble. This massive pile of stone and steel is just as much a monument to the many generations of incarcerated people who have lived inside San Quentin, where California’s extensive prison system began.
Kenneth Lamott arrived at the prison in 1952, not as an inmate, but as a high school level teacher. His Chronicles of San Quentin is not only a researched history of the infamous institution, but also the events, decisions, and laws that have surrounded it.
“Many of the stories told by the old timers in my classes turned out to be pure mythology,” Lamott wrote. He credits San Quentin’s librarian, Herman K. Spector, with steering him to a number of historical records and first-hand accounts.
Lamott traced CDCR’s origins to a quiet Sunday afternoon in July 1849, to a place not far from the isolated peninsula locals called Punta de Quentin. There, a gang of more than 50 White youths who called themselves “The Hounds” attacked a Chilean shopkeeper. The altercation, allegedly over an unpaid debt, devolved into a massive wave of arson, shootings, and rapes.
Community members rounded up the gang’s leaders, the courts convicting them almost as quickly. Lamott reported that two of the men received sentences of ten years of hard labor at “any penitentiary the governor might name.”
While the sentences were a demand for accountability, any hope of real justice was shortlived. With the nearest prison being thousands of miles eastward, the Hounds were simply allowed to go free.
Eager to establish a state prison, the embarrassed legislature received an offer from former Mexican general Mariano Guadalupe Vallejo and his business partner, state militia leader James Madison Estell. Its terms were simple. Vallejo and Estell offered twenty acres of the land on Punta de Quentin, and agreed to build the prison themselves. They further sweetened the deal by promising to hire and pay the guards, and provide clothing and food for the incarcerated.
Lamott described Vallejo and Estell as “among the notable scoundrels of their time,” noting the two business partners asked only one thing in return — the unrestricted ability to use the labor of the incarcerated population in any manner they wished.
The legislature immediately agreed. In accepting the offer, California not only created its first state prison, but also established the precedent of using incarcerated labor for profit.
It took little time for the state to begin filling its new prison with incarcerated men and women, but it would take nearly forty years before the state approved a regular plan for allowing them a way out.
In 1891, a group of seven inmates requested permission to raise funds for an attorney who would advocate for a state parole law. Ohio had established the nation’s first parole program in 1884, but California waited until 1893 to follow suit. For years thereafter, those who believed the state’s parole law too lenient would often claim the men serving time inside of San Quentin had written it.
According to Lamott’s research, California’s prisons have a long history of overcrowding. The state’s rapidly growing incarcerated population necessitated the opening of Folsom in 1880 as well as youth facilities in Whittier and Ione before the end of the century.
By 1904, over 1500 incarcerated men and women at San Quentin occupied just 600 cells, most of the men housed five or six to a single-man cell inside one of four small Spanish-style buildings. Several policymakers advocated for reducing its population, closing the prison and selling the valuable land for the development of housing along the Bay Shore.
Instead, the legislature voted to expand the prison, a process that began with pouring concrete for the first of three buildings dedicated to “modern” incarcerated housing. The first of these opened in 1913, and for more than a half-century, South Block would hold the title of the largest cell block in the world.
Despite the commitment to new buildings, life at San Quentin remained arguably very “un-modern.” Many incarcerated men began their day by filling a bucket full of water and heading to the Rose Bowl, an open-air cold-water bath located on the lower yard.
For many decades, men were forced to join the long bucket brigade that led them to bathe in a public space where a thousand other men washed the dirt, sweat, and open sores they acquired working in the jute mill. Perhaps thinking such a thing barbaric, the administration eventually moved the Rose Bowl to the upper yard, which resulted in a somewhat shorter walk.
Around this same time, one state senator began campaigning for a law that would require San Quentin to provide dentures to the incarcerated men and women who needed them. Lamott’s account of the debate noted that some members of the public disagreed, arguing that providing false teeth to inmates amounted to turning a prison into a “paradise and weakening the very foundations of justice.”
“When a fellow needs teeth, he needs them bad,” Lamott quoted the senator as saying, noting the lawmaker had been alarmed to discover a great many of the incarcerated being made to dine at what the warden had officially termed the “toothless table.”
Mary Von, one of San Quentin’s incarcerated women, was given the first set of state-issued false teeth in 1912. She was executed the following year.
In summarizing his research, Lamott tempered his hope for the future with what he termed a realistic assessment of the history he had documented inside San Quentin’s walls.
“It would be more satisfying to conclude either with a mighty denunciation of the stupidity, futility, and cruelty,” Lamott wrote. “Or alternatively, with a confident and clear-eyed view of the wonders that are going to be accomplished by the brave and enlightened men [and women] who are now in charge… If we can ever summon up the courage to admit the bankruptcy that hides behind the fine, self-deceiving words, perhaps things will be better sometime in the future.”
