On Wednesday mornings, 30 men meet at San Quentin’s Chapel C, a clean and squat building in the prison’s airy courtyard. Walking past the pond and fountain, the neatly manicured lawn and palm trees, they file into an empty room and arrange their chairs in a circle, strumming guitars as they go.

The group is an unlikely one. A deaf rapper who goes by Westbird sits in the corner, communicating via interpreter and tablet. A musician of 45 years who studied at Ecuador’s national conservatory quietly takes notes on my right. A former member of the Manson Family, now 82, chats with me about Bob Dylan and how Los Angeles has changed since the 1960s. After class, he shows me a crisp photo of his fiancée he keeps in his wallet.

Despite their diverse backgrounds, these men have one thing in common: They all come to the chapel to write music that helps them cope with the trauma of incarceration.

In Essence Goldman’s program, “Believe Music Heals,” the Bay Area recording artist provides weekly songwriting prompts that encourage students to explore this pain and healing process.

Some participants have been incarcerated for decades, and they told me this class pushes them to think about their past, the prison system and rehabilitation in a new light.

On April 9, one participant serving time for murder, Steve, shared a song written from the perspective of his victim’s daughter. He said class gave him "the chance to dig out a demon I’ve carried for 48 years.”

San Quentin's courtyard and Chapel C.
(photo courtesy of CDCR)

Another, named Luis, broke down in tears singing about the inescapable loneliness in his cell. Davis wrote about a dream he had of his mother confronting him at his victim’s grave more than 50 years after the crime, and the group helped him work out the melody.

“We’re like a little family in here now,” Tucker, a student, said. “Sometimes I feel like I’m forgotten about… this gives me hope.”

Programs like this make the prison unique. San Quentin, once notorious for being the state’s oldest prison and housing some of America’s most infamous criminals, is now considered a model of incarceration for its progressive culture and wealth of opportunities.

In 2023, Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he would transform the prison into a flagship for the California Model, his statewide plan to make correctional facilities more rehabilitative based on Norwegian prisons.

In addition to Goldman’s class, San Quentin hosts the most coveted education, art and rehabilitation programming in the California prison system. Mount Tamalpais College is the first independent liberal arts institution dedicated specifically to serving incarcerated students, and provides associate’s degree programs at no cost to participants, according to its website. The prison is also home to the San Quentin News, a nonprofit paper run by its residents with a circulation of 35,000. Incarcerated reporters regularly cover events such as the San Quentin Film Festival, the first of its kind to be held inside a prison. The William James Association (WJA) offers a variety of arts courses to residents, including printmaking, creative writing and painting.

“It gave me a place to settle down. It gave me a place to take time, to find myself, a place to get away from all the … ruckus,” said Isiah Daniels, a former San Quentin resident who now serves on the WJA Alumni Advisory Committee. “There was still junk going on, and the fighting and the behaviors, and I was just trying to find this place to get away. And so I went to the William James.”

These programs are often a first step to rehabilitation during incarceration, but San Quentin residents have to wait months, sometimes years, for a chance to get into them. Budget cuts have left those formerly funded by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) to survive off external donors and volunteers, with limited staff and supplies. Others, like “Believe Music Heals,” were never supported by the department in the first place.

In March of 2023, the governor’s initiative to improve California prisons started with San Quentin, allocating $360 million for its transformation. It looked like a chance to get money back to arts and education programs. The state prison was renamed San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, and the unit known as Death Row was phased out, as inmates sentenced to death were transferred to the general population in other prisons.

The governor assembled a 21-member advisory council for the transformation, consisting of political allies, correctional officials, programmers and formerly incarcerated people, and the group produced a 157-page report outlining 10 lead recommendations for Newsom’s plan.

Alongside highlighting the importance of funding programming, the group suggested several crucial and long-overdue changes. One was improving what correctional officers receive for training, which the report described as “punitive, authoritative” and “toxic.” Another was ending double-celling, which leaves two grown men at San Quentin crammed into 46 square feet of living space — less than the legal requirement for farm animals in California under Proposition 12.

But two years later, the vast majority of the money allocated for Newsom’s transformation project isn’t actually going to any of this. The budget is instead going to the demolition and reconstruction of Building 38, a 70,000-square-foot former furniture warehouse at San Quentin that will be rebuilt as a new “educational and vocational center” slated to open next March.

Newsom’s complex will comprise three buildings, according to CDCR: A new technology and media center, a library and a “multipurpose gathering space,” with a cafe and store. Each building includes “general classrooms” which will reportedly triple the prison’s programming space.

Kevin Shepler, who has been incarcerated at San Quentin since January of 2024, sent me a letter the same week I visited Goldman’s class. We had previously corresponded about Newsom’s transformation and his experience at San Quentin as an artist. He said he signed up for painting, drawing, piano and guitar classes the same month he arrived, and more than a year later has yet to secure a spot, likely due to these budget and space constraints.

He called the focus on rehabilitation at San Quentin largely a “farce,” and criticized mainstream media for “interviewing the hand-picked ‘yes-men’ inmates” about the transformation project.

“I am a fiscally conservative man, and don’t believe taxpayers’ money is being spent wisely, especially when it comes to the judicial and prison systems,” he wrote. “That said, I believe that the money spent on arts in prisons has more positive rewards than many other programs in here.”

Shepler, like many of the more than 40 members of the San Quentin community I interviewed, is not convinced that Building 38 would further his or his peers’ rehabilitation. Why not support stretched-thin programming instead?

Jody Lewen is the president of Mount Tamalpais College and served on Newsom’s advisory council. While she said the college has been promised more classrooms in Building 38, she’s not holding her breath — according to Lewen, they haven’t been told how much space they’ll have, and are receiving no new funding from the project’s budget.

“I think I was somewhat naive going into it. But one of the things I've learned is that often, with large-scale initiatives, the impetus is primarily political,” Lewen said about her experience as an advisory council member. “I realized that it’s almost a branding opportunity, more than a material intention.”

The advisory board had no tangible power to change construction plans, and there was no obligation to follow their guidance. Lewen authored another report titled "Operationalizing Transformation" urging Newsom to rethink Building 38, and instead invest those resources into current programming and infrastructure to avoid environmental and financial consequences. That recommendation was also not followed.

Other rehabilitative programmers said they feel similarly left behind by the California Model. Henry Frank, who was released from San Quentin in 2013, is the communications administrator at the William James Association. He said the brunt of the rehabilitative work at San Quentin is placed on external programmers, not the department.

“They're heavily leaning on the community-based organizations to pick up that slack because they're not qualified to do it,” he said. “They're the captors. They're the ones who are enforcing these laws that they put into place for people to behave accordingly.”

Students at a WJA origami class at San Quentin. (photo by Peter Merts)

The WJA Alumni Advisory Committee, a group of formerly incarcerated people who participated in the association’s classes in prison, meets monthly. In their March meeting, past San Quentin residents strongly opposed Newsom’s plan.

“The Newsom stuff and the California Model, that's politics. The art room, Arts in Corrections, to people who participate in it, that's spiritual. That's church,” Felix Lucero, formerly incarcerated at San Quentin, said.

In 2010, the CDCR entirely halted funding for Arts in Corrections, the program that supported the WJA. When this funding was cut, long term research had already been published showing that Arts in Corrections programs reduced rule violations by 65% and saved the CDCR hundreds of thousands of measurable dollars. The WJA survived for several years off private donors until Arts in Corrections was reinstated, but has since operated in a far more limited capacity.

Even those in favor of Newsom’s transformation plan recognize its weaknesses. Ron Broomfield, former San Quentin warden and director of adult institutions for the CDCR, is a staunch defender of the California Model and its goals. In separate conversations with current and former residents and programmers, they praised Broomfield as someone devoted to rehabilitation and improving California’s prison system. He said that, although he was excited about the demolition and construction project, he recognizes there are more pressing issues at the prison.

“We're going to have this gorgeous rehabilitative center, and then we're going to send people back to housing units that were built almost 100 years ago and were not designed for rehabilitation, were not designed for dignity, were not designed for safety,” he said.