David Basile walked outside the walls of San Quentin on June 3, a free man after more than 30 years of incarceration. Convicted of first-degree murder in Santa Clara County, Basile acknowledges that the road to freedom has been full of obstacles of his own making.
“I began to use illegal drugs at the age of 10,” Basile said. “It escalated to me shooting heroin for the first time on Nov. 19, 1969.”
Basile said he battled drug addiction for more than three decades and conquering those demons was a tough road. It was important for him to do this to change his life, he added.
His first conviction, which was for conspiracy to distribute 1,700 pounds of marijuana, landed him a three-year stint in the federal prison in Lompoc. He came to San Quentin in 1981 for a year for attempted burglary.
Since his current prison term began in 1983, Basile has been in and out of Administrative Segregation. He said that during his last time in Ad-Seg in 2009, a paradigm shift began to occur in his thinking. “I had to leave that anti-social lifestyle and the people who ascribed to it behind.”
He described 2009 as the loneliest year of his life. When Basile was released from Ad-Seg in 2009, he enrolled in Patten University, an on-site college program at San Quentin. “This one move allowed me to reintegrate and communicate with people who were into positive programming and were attempting to change their lives.”
Even though he already had a college degree, he said the biggest lesson he learned was one he never expected. “It allowed me to see humanity without the blinders I wore that restricted my past interactions with my own race.”
He also credits other programs with helping him overcome some of his obstacles. He began attending Victims Offender Education Group (VOEG) in 2006. In 2007, he took part in a mediated visit with the family of the victims of his crime.
“After this, I began to make direct and indirect amends in my life for the crimes I committed,” Basile said. “In 2009, while involved in the VOEG Next-Step program, several of us put together a curriculum for the Reception Center inmates who were then in the gym. This was the beginning of giving back to my community.”
It was while he was doing this work that he said he began to understand how much he was changing and, more importantly, that it was possible to change.
“I remember running into a couple of homeboys who I knew from other prisons. They told me that they were astonished by the change they saw in me. It was all the validation I needed to know I was on the right path.”
It was during his work with at-risk youth in the SQUIRES program that he began to piece together some important aspects of his life. “What I saw with these at-risk youths helped me to track my own personal history,” he said. “By understanding myself, I soon began to see the connection, which affected my behavior, addiction and incarceration.”
The clarity he got from working with these young men in the SQUIRES program allowed him to make a greater impact on his community by sharing his experiences and relating them to others.
In 2013, Basile became chairman of the SQUIRES program and he said he began to think about the young men who had gone through the program. “I want to establish an at-risk youth intervention group in conjunction with SQUIRES,” said Basile. He envisions a SQUIRES after-care program that will continue to address the issues that the young men confronted during their visits to San Quentin.
Basile also began to tutor fellow prisoners in preparation for the GED test as a way of making direct amends. Basile was part of a conversation about education in prison when then-Director of Corrections Mathew Cate visited the Prison University Project in 2012. Because of that visit by Cate, a program was established that set up a nighttime tutoring program, in which Basile took part.
Basile said he has worked hard for the past five years to really change his life, not only for himself, but also for other people who might be in his shoes. “For the last five years my goal has been to model the work that individuals like me can do in order to have hope of a suitability finding. Now, I look forward to walking out of prison and being a successful model for those who have many challenges ahead of them when it comes to parole.”
Basile admitted that waiting out the governor’s review period for his suitability finding was the hardest time he ever had to do. “I never thought this day would come. But through hard work and programming, anyone can turn things around. I will miss many of the people at San Quentin and look forward to hearing of their success as well.”
