Having just arrived at San Quentin on July 29, 2009, some would say that I have not really experienced the ‘Q’ at all, that the grin permanently etched upon my face is nothing more than honeymoon glow. I would argue the opposite.
My first morning on the yard was a definite shock—sensory overload. There was simply too much to do, and everyone was doing. Everyone had a plan, it seemed. Men wore hats declaring their memberships in various groups and clubs. A man practiced Yoga and T’ai Chi, his slow, deliberate movements giving a surreal quality by the early morning S.Q. fog. A mixed group of prisoners played tennis on the immaculate court, the sound of which played havoc on my childhood memories. A bulletin board in North Block listed all the programs I could join—the television even ran a scrolling channel proclaiming more activities.
As I walked the track that first morning, I smelled the salt of the ocean, saw palm trees blowing in the breeze; a man playing a trumpet—its crisp notes ringing clear and true.
A scoreboard in right-center field proclaimed the area as, “San Quentin’s Field of Dreams.” A baseball field in prison? Where was I? What was this place that had everything?
Well, not everything. Some-thing was definitely missing—a few somethings in fact. Where are the guns, the oppressive regulations, and the lockdowns? The overwhelming atmosphere of heavy, disconsolate dread that I’d lived under for the past 22 years–factions of opposing prisoners, engaged in a perpetual standoff under watchful hawk-eyed gunners. They had vanished, like the bayside fog beneath the late morning sun. None of the several hundred men on the yard that morning seemed the slightest bit concerned with me or what I was about, at least not in a negative fashion. Within a half hour, I had a tennis racquet in my hand, laughing my way to a sore belly with a cosmopolitan group of prisoners—stone walls disappeared, we could have been at any number of community tennis clubs.
By the evening of my fifth day in S.Q. I was signed up for the upcoming Patten University semester, enrolled in Non-Violent Communication, signed up for two Arts in Corrections classes, and joined the Pirates Baseball Team. Everywhere there was a current of moving forward—of dedication to a higher set of ideals—of prisoners taking charge of their own lives, dropping age-old habits steeped in nonsensical prison mentality. S.Q. has that elusive factor in successful rehabilitation: the Therapeutic Environment.
So, yes, I do walk around with a smile on my face all the time—even when it seems as though we are being harassed, I consider the alternative; I could be back in the war zones. Perhaps it is being new here which makes it all seem so profoundly innovative, and worth the little hassles. Or, maybe it’s just that I retain a degree of perspective that tends to be lost after the years. Whatever the case, there exists here something which is special and unique, and worthy of our genuine participation in all it has to offer. After all, the rest of the system is waiting, poised to lock us up in one of the non-programming warehouses, con-tent to allow us to feed on the miseries of one another until, at last, we die without ever having realized hope.
