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For two years, I walked the lower yard track at San Quentin State Prison, watching construction crews tear down an old furniture factory to build a $239 million Scandinavian-styled learning center. They have now removed the fence blocking the incarcerated population’s view of the new facility. Last week marked the opening of the building, only for incarcerated people who have designated programming inside.

Gov. Gavin Newsom was back at San Quentin a few weeks ago for handshakes, photographs, and a ribbon-cutting ceremony to memorialize these next step towards “normalization” — one of the four pillars of his so-called “California Model” of reform that re-named the prison I live in as the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center. This is what normalization means to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR): Instead of sending people back to their communities, the state is spending millions on new buildings, and accessibility for incarcerated people is unclear at best.

This new building complex serves mainly as an expensive rebranding effort to make California prisons appear less inhumane after decades of cruel and dehumanizing treatment. Despite continued projected declines in the incarcerated population, CDCR’s proposed 2026-27 budget has grown to nearly $14.2 billion, much of it going to officer pay, which continues to climb at triple the rate of inflation, driving annual costs per incarcerated person to about $130,000 annually.

Less than 5 percent of CDCR’s budget actually goes toward rehabilitation. These include CDCR-approved programs such as Integrated Substance Use Disorder Treatment and peer literacy mentor programs, not necessarily community-based programs. Legislators were critical of this lack of funding and CDCR’s harmful track record during the recent Assembly Accountability and Oversight Budget Subcommittee hearing. Assemblymember Mia Bonta described the 200 incarcerated lives lost to suicide under CDCR custody as “reprehensible.”

Any healing accomplished inside is done in spite of the prison, not because of it.

Any healing accomplished inside is done in spite of the prison, not because of it.

As these numbers suggest, CDCR’s priority is to maintain prisons. Any healing accomplished inside is done in spite of the prison, not because of it. Many of us have spent decades building and running effective prisoner-led programs, while CDCR has been focused on warehousing people in cages and punishing them.

As California Limits Water Use, People in Prison Face Punishment for Showering

I have experienced this punishment firsthand. After speaking out about the need for prison reform, the San Quentin warden fired me from my job as the editor-in-chief of San Quentin News, a paper run by incarcerated people in the prison, and banned me from participating in all media programs at the prison. While the state commemorates new buildings with photo-ops and compelling words, incarcerated people like myself have to continually weigh the costs of speaking up or accepting unhealthy, decaying conditions marked by environmental poisons, debilitating stress, lack of access to programming, and proper nutrition necessary to maintain our health and wellness.

Rehabilitation is not simply about offering classes or constructing new buildings; it’s about fostering agency, voice, and the capacity for civic engagement.

These new buildings will now take agency away from the incarcerated population, making prisoner-initiated programming exponentially more difficult by requiring prison staff or community volunteers to utilize key cards to access rehabilitative spaces. Despite a multitude of windows in the new buildings, creating a fish bowl effect, and almost 200 audio and video surveillance cameras, no incarcerated individuals will be allowed to use the space without a non-prisoner sitting inside the room.

The truth is that helping people heal and transform their lives so that they might return to society will reduce the size, power, and scope of CDCR. This should be considered a metric of success. Massive corrections budgets are not based on successes, but past failures. In fact, CDCR is currently spending hundreds of millions of dollars to maintain thousands of empty beds and multiple empty prisons rather than diverting those funds toward rehabilitation and getting people home to their families.

The need for prison closure, decarceration, and CDCR budget oversight was underlined by Amber-Rose Howard, a formerly incarcerated woman and executive director of Californians United for a Responsible Budget, in her testimony at the Subcommittee 7 hearing on March 18. “Even with declining prison populations, California is still projected to maintain thousands of empty prison beds. In other words, the state is continuing to spend billions to operate facilities that are no longer needed,” Howard said. “That raises an important question for policymakers: Are we budgeting for the prison system California used to have, or the one we actually need today?”

If CDCR is serious about its rehabilitative mission, it will take more than expensive new buildings and a new name. While this Scandinavian-styled learning center will increase San Quentin’s operating expenses by 2027-28, it is not increasing or enhancing rehabilitative programming as Governor Newsom intends. Programs that have always operated inside San Quentin are simply shifting away from the old education annex to this new building, which include the education department, Mount Tamalpais College, San Quentin News, the “Ear Hustle” podcast, and The Last Mile Coding Program. Many prisoner-led programs are being evicted from the education annex spaces they have utilized for decades. Programs like Criminal Thinking, Gangs Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, domestic violence prevention, and many others are temporarily canceled and waiting to be approved for space because the old education annex will be off-limits. Some programs may never find a new space.

If building plans similar to these were implemented statewide across all California prisons, it would cost $20 billion over a 25-year period. This is not what imprisoned people want or need. Instead of focusing on manufacturing normalized communities in prison, similar to the outside world, the state should release those who came to prison as youth and who are now elderly and aged out of crime.

Additionally, California should adopt a comprehensive roadmap to close more prisons — a solution recently affirmed by the Legislative Analyst’s Office as a result of excess bed capacity, anticipated maintenance repairs exceeding the cost of San Quentin’s new learning center, and projected cost-savings of approximately $150 million annually. These savings can be invested into community-based resources and reentry programs to support individuals returning home.

“We know that many folks have been serving long, draconian sentences and have been incarcerated since the ‘90s when we saw the large crime bills come down from the federal government, ” Howard said. “As we continue to decarcerate, we should be closing prisons.”

There are almost 34,000 people in California prisons classified as “long-term offenders,” meaning they have life sentences with or without the possibility of parole or sentences of more than 50 years. Thousands of these individuals have been in custody more than 20 years and are eligible for youth offender and elderly parole releases. Thousands are elderly or infirm, receiving inadequate care and costing anywhere from $200,000-$300,000 to incarcerate annually. These people could be reviewed for compassionate releases. CDCR’s own data shows re-arrest rates among those serving life sentences is 4 percent.

San Quentin’s transformation should not be measured by the size of its new learning center or the new name at its gate. If CDCR is serious about rehabilitation, we need to prioritize bringing people home over manufacturing and normalizing prison communities. When Governor Newsom made his announcement about transforming San Quentin in March 2023, he said, “We have to be in the homecoming business.” Spending more money on prison infrastructure does not bring us closer to that goal. Instead of building new prison facilities, California should invest in releasing people and supporting local communities. That’s real public safety.

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Steve Brooks is an award-winning journalist with bylines in TIME, Sports Illustrated, Bay City News Local News Matters, and more. He is the former editor- in-chief of San Quentin News and a co-founder of The People In Blue, a group of incarcerated people who helped create California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s Reimagine San Quentin report.

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