The warden who changed prisons across America
Long before there was an R in CDCR, incarcerated people found a powerful advocate in the most unexpected of places.
The proverbial seeds of the “California Model” were planted decades ago by San Quentin’s most famous warden, Clinton T. Duffy.
Within the annals of pop culture, films have long depicted San Quentin’s ominous walls as the merciless personification of despair, a crucible of justice where hope goes to die.
Such cliches belie the institution’s history of leading national rehabilitative reforms.
“San Quentin is my hometown,” Duffy told the Saturday Evening Post in 1950. “I like to think it is unlike any other town in the world because its heart is locked up, a town in exile that has had its face lifted … a town beginning to live again.”
Born in 1898 to a SQ guard and his wife, Duffy grew up on the institution’s grounds. In 1929, he began a seven-year stretch working as secretary to Warden Holohan.
What in the fall of 1940 began as a 30-day job as interim warden eventually turned into 12 years. Yet, in only a matter of months, Warden Clinton Duffy changed prisons across America forever.
According to the Post, he immediately banned the use of clubs, lashes, straps, and hoses to punish inmates, and fired the guard captain and six “screws” he believed incapable of following the new rule.
Men were no longer forced to shave their heads or wear numbers printed on their clothes. New radio headsets in their cells connected every man with the world outside.
A conduit for news inside of the prison was equally important. The specters of rumor and gossip, Duffy told the Post, were rampant, often at odds with the truth.
Residents were getting their news through the grapevine rather than from a reliable source. Questions like What is the new parole policy and When will the prison camps open were subject to rumor rather than fact.
With this in mind, on December 10, 1940, San Quentin News published its first edition, which the warden described as “hand-set and printed on gaudy green paper.”
Open lines of communication were of paramount importance, Duffy explained. Ignoring protests from the guards, the gray haired bespectacled warden walked SQ’s yard alone and unarmed to speak with its residents.
“…I was glad to have the men take an active interest in the rebuilding of their town. I wanted them to have a voice in the program, too,” he told the Post.
Duffy established what he described to the Post as the first prison “house of representatives,” or Inmate Departmental Representative Committee. The IDRC in turn requested a store from which men could purchase cigarettes, candy, cookies, and postage stamps.
Such items had long been considered contraband, yet were often available at vastly inflated prices on prison tiers and in poker games.
The warden agreed to the IDRC’s request, and SQ’s first canteen opened in August 1941.
In his five-part interview with the Post, Duffy shared what has become a famous story from his tenure. It involved Bill, a 19-year-old Nevada man, convicted of five counts of robbery, serving a sentence of five-to-life for each.
Bill had been tossed in the hole by SQ guards for altering a toothbrush out of sheer boredom.
“I was moldin’ the handle,” he told a visiting Duffy. “I found out that I could soften it up and bend it. A guy’s gotta do somethin’,” the Post noted.
Duffy said he spent the next morning visiting hotels in the San Francisco area, collecting discarded toothbrushes. These he delivered to Bill in a shoebox that included some simple tools, acetone, a few other harmless chemicals, and a permit ensuring that the guards would allow him to work unfettered.
Within weeks, Bill began filling the warden’s pockets with plastic rings every time the two met on the yard. For years Duffy handed these out as souvenirs to his visitors.
Sailors headed to the South Pacific began requesting rings, earrings, and brooches to trade or send home to sweethearts. Duffy said he solicited a legislator friend in Sacramento to write a bill allowing inmates to make and sell handicrafts at the prison.
Bill eventually paroled, having amassed over $2,000 that he used to start his own plastics business. Duffy told the Post he was confident Bill would never spend another day inside prison walls.
Amongst the warden’s other innovations were vocational training, music programs, the first incarcerated chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous, a resident-developed radio program, and the first “scientific” classification system for incarcerated persons.
Duffy challenged a nation of Post readers to better understand what it means to be incarcerated.“Confinement in itself is punishment,” he told the Post, “but confinement need not be without hope or the chance to remake shattered lives.”
