Sneaking into San Quentin Prison
It’s a simple question: What is the stupidest thing you have ever done as you tottered along on your journey through life? Walked in front of a car absorbed with your email on your cellphone? Made a bomb joke at an airport? Remonstrated with a police officer in a country where multiple zeros are clearly shown on its national currency? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I am proud to admit and share with my betters that I have made some serious missteps along my journey, and to suggest that should the occasion arise that you not make the same kind of mistakes at risk of your children’s inheritance.
My first mistake was perhaps deciding to go diving with great white sharks. It sounded terrifying and it was. Then, when I first read that the “floating coffin,” a high speed, cigar shaped rocket boat that zoomed along the great inland sea of the Tonle Sap in Cambodia from Angkor Wat south to the capital of Phnom Penh in 5 short hours — but sometimes had various parts like the propeller fall off — I paid no attention and subsequently paid the price. Yes, I am still here, obviously, but if bailing 100,000 gallons out of a boat on a lake full of crocodiles is not your style, my suggestion is to pay attention to the mistakes and misjudgments of others. Especially in regards to sneaking into prisons and taking photos as proof.
Vanity pays the price. I have visited several prisons along my journey in life, including the men’s and women’s prisons in Kathmandu, Nepal, and what wonderful deeds I accomplished there! It meant finding ways to parole dozens of women in prison for life by creating a cosmetology project in order these women could be released and get jobs. In retrospect I would admit that the argument between criminal rehabilitation versus punishment takes on different forms and aspects in different countries. In short, pay attention to that advice and don’t be a bloody fool and decide to sneak into any prisons in the Excited States because you may regret your foolishness. You have been warned.
San Quentin Prison sits on the shores of San Francisco Bay just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in beautiful Marin County, California like a wart on a cancer. Like building a house, you can’t construct a kitchen without adding a toilet as well. When creating a city, you need to remember the need for a jail as well as housing. One comes with the other. When the Gold Rush hit California way back in 1847, the first edifice found to be missing from civic planning was a sturdy jail to deal with all the desperados who didn’t get rich off the gold but decided to borrow from those that did.
At first the local civic leaders put all the bad guys in a ship tethered to shore off Marin County and soon the authorities realized they needed better and larger accommodations. Not for themselves; for the prisoners! The resulting prison has earned a well-deserved reputation as a place you really don’t want to go to, so I decided I would go there, just to say hello and see wassup. If there was a method to my madness, I confess I have forgotten what it was.
It was the old argument between rehab and punishment that caught my eye. I was of the opinion that if you were going to lock violent men up, throw away the key, let them rot, treat them as harshly as you can, and then release them back into society with no training or money, unfortunate circumstances were likely to occur. There were many critics of the prison system who guaranteed that negative results could be expected and went so far as to say that there was a construct known as the “prison industry” that guaranteed the poor white trash guards an excellent income at the expense of certain racial minorities who provided a lucrative product to keep their own guards well employed.
As a reporter for the liberal newspaper The Pacific Sun in liberal Marin County I happened to meet a local film producer who wanted to make a documentary about the prison, and who also happened to live literally right across the street in San Quentin Village, a community as old as the prison. Kramer had gained the friendship of many of the guards and prison employees because they parked right in front of his house for a few decades and supported his argument that a discussion should be held on the topic of punishment for misdeeds, as opposed to rehab, especially if they got to appear in the movie themselves.
At that time I was looking to find an editor for a documentary of my own about an expedition I had made in Nepal, after which I subsequently visited the federal prisons in Kathmandu. Kramer and I stuck a deal. I would provide a cover story in the Pacific Sun about his own documentary, and he would edit my expedition footage about my Nepal trek and we would both be happy campers. The key to the deal was his agreement that he would somehow smuggle me into the prison as a “gaffer,” a member of his film crew that carried the extra equipment needed to justify my existence. A deal was done.
No good story is complete without a digression so first some words about San Quentin’s history. It was originally designed to hold 3,317 inmates; on the day that I enjoyed my little excursion, its prison population neared 6,000. Its front doors opened in 1852 and not much has been improved since. Notorious gangs like the Black Guerilla Family, the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Texas Syndicate, La Nuestra Familia, the Asian Tong, Hell’s Angels, and the Crips are well represented. Apparently very few people are welcomed into San Quentin by mistake, if you don’t happen to include me, the reporter pretending to be someone who was not.
According to an entry in Wikipedia, a 2005 court-ordered report found the prison “old, antiquated, dirty, poorly staffed, poorly maintained with inadequate medical space and equipment and overcrowded.” It has been legally mandated that all executions in California must occur at San Quentin. The methods for execution have “improved” over the years. Between 1893 and 1937, 215 people were executed at San Quentin by hanging, after which 196 prisoners were put to death in the gas chamber. In 1995, the use of gas for execution was ruled “cruel and unusual punishment,” which led to executions inside the gas chamber by lethal injection. These days, there are still several hundred inmates at the Q awaiting execution by the needle on Death Row.
I met Kramer and his partner Richie at the front doors of the prison. My training period as a gaffer was rather brief. “Don’t drop any equipment and don’t crap your pants.” Above all, he could have included: “What the hell are you thinking?” As a reporter with the local (very liberal) newsmagazine, it doesn’t bear thinking what would have happened to me had the warden discovered who I was and what I was doing there.
“Oh, they’ll check you out, alright” said Herzog in our first meeting weeks before. “They’ll shine a flashlight way up your rear end. You just don’t walk up to the front gate of San Quentin and say hello. You’ll have to submit your ID and lots of other personal data weeks in advance. Let’s hope they don’t find out who you really are. They aren’t all that fond of reporters, especially the Pacific Sun. You get caught while in there, there’s big trouble.”
The prison dates back about 150 years and is really a crumbling medieval dungeon in dire need of demolition. The Sallyport is just one of a series of gates through which we pass in order to get inside. Along the way we get a nice little lecture about what happens during an emergency of any sort inside the prison. “If the siren goes off while you are on the grounds,” says one guard to me, who happens to be toting a very large weapon that looks like a shotgun, “hit the ground immediately. You have three seconds to do so. Anybody still standing up after three seconds is recognized to be a security threat and you stand the risk of being shot.”
Anyone suffering from constipation is well directed to drop into San Quentin and have a similar chat with somebody toting a whacking huge gun he wants to use. As we walk the Yard I avoid any sort of eye contact with any prisoners whatsoever and concentrate on holding a tripod and other camera gear while looking around surreptitiously and making mental notes. I also take the opportunity of shooting some very unauthorized photos on my own camera, hoping like hell that no guards are watching but well aware that some of the prisoners are watching me like hawks. One pair, sitting at a table nearby, regard me in the way that a hungry dog looks at a piece of hamburger. I pretend nonchalance.
When the siren goes off, I don’t immediately identify the sound. It sounds sort of like the lunch bell at high school, only much louder. One moment I am talking face to face to a prisoner, the next moment I find myself kissing the pavement and wondering what the hell is going on. After a few long moments facing the dirt, I allow myself a quick peek and see that the entire prison population is also down on the ground, but the cooler dudes are just kneeling down on one knee. Personally, I am sweating bullets. I look up and a guard is standing next to me with his shotgun cocked right at me. He gives me a smile. I lack the nonchalance to do the same. I am beginning to feel like an idiot who ought to be locked up for his own protection.
Ostensibly we are here to shoot video footage of players learning how to play tennis. The warden has been convinced by the guards that allowing prisoners to play some sports is a good way to build team work and stop them from killing each other. There is a baseball team too, although the weightlifting machinery has been removed because some of the prisoners were turning into incredible hulks, many of whom wander about and smack their lips at the sight of fresh meat like me to snack on.
My only form of self defence is my trusty Panasonic Lumix with zoom lens that hangs around my neck like a wounded albatross and somehow escaped the body search to which I was subjected on entry to the prison. The temptation to use the zoom to shoot a close-up photo of the Death Chamber is tempting, but even more tempting is the possibility of walking out of the Yard with any photos at all to prove I had actually snuck into the most famous prison in the world. When I think no one is looking I casually press the button on my camera, my heart pounding while I do so. Stupid is as stupid does.
Afterwards the warden hosts a meeting in a small room with our film crew, some guards and selected prisoners who can be trusted to walk around the Yard and not stab any visitors. I try my best to look inconsequential, taking notes in a small book so as to draw attention away from my camera. This ruse does not work. One inmate sidles over and starts to talk to me out of the side of his mouth. “You a reporter?” he says. “I’ve been here 31 years and I never seen a reporter in here before.”
“No,” I reply, swallowing deeply. “I’m here with the film crew. We’re making a documentary.” “Oh, I seen Kramer and his buddy here many times before,” he replies, “and they never had nobody with them. I seen you taking pictures too. What newspaper you with?”
My opinion of the warden or whoever it is speaking, framed by his enthusiastic speech about the need for harsh punishment and to forget about stupid ideas like rehabilitation, rises somewhat when he announces that our meeting is over and all visitors must leave immediately. We are frog marched back to the Sallyport, where a weird looking dude in a white lab coat looking like a demented Dr. Strangelove pats us down, checks off our names on the sheet and opens a huge steel door with bars like a medieval portcullis to let us go.
The moment I am on the side of the door that I want to be on, I turn and snap his photo, just to prove I was really there and somehow got out again. The mad doctor pauses and gives me a chuckle and a smile. I feel a year older than when I came in a few hours ago but since you are now reading this, it may be assumed that I successfully escaped. My suggestion to all and sundry reading this is to enjoy the story, have a good laugh and best to forget about sneaking into any prisons by yourself. That would be a really stupid thing to do.