San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin, California's oldest correctional facility, was erected in 1852. Along with Folsom State Prison, built in 1880 outside the state capitol of Sacramento, San Quentin was constructed to meet the punishment needs of San Francisco's criminal justice system. The Bay Area, which realized successive waves of immigration, internal and external, from 1850 onward, became a crossroad for travel and expansion in the Pacific region and developed a reputation for lawlessness, quick wealth, and prolific sin unequaled anywhere in the western United States.

Before construction of a permanent correctional facility, the state confined offenders to a 268-ton prison bark, The Waban, anchored in the San Francisco Bay. However, the influx of prospectors following the discovery of gold in 1849, Pacific Rim peoples seeking work in the expanding industrial infrastructure of California after the Civil War, and the fallout from successive ore strikes in Alaska and the Yukon created a serious need for a large and efficient penal institution. San Quentin met the multiple needs of the region, housing unprecedented numbers of inmates for the time, females as well as males until 1934, and utilizing inmate labor in public and private ventures. Today San Quentin is the site of a large, sophisticated, and profitable prison industries complex attracting small manufacturing firms, telemarketing, and state contractors.

San Quentin has held a variety of well-known criminals: Caryl Chessman, the alleged “Blue-Light Bandit,” whose execution in 1960 stirred global controversy; Charles Manson, the mastermind of the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders in 1969; and George Jackson, the celebrated black militant and writer, shot dead by correctional officers in 1971. San Quentin has also been the site of seminal changes in American penology; it was a leader in the national execution binge of the 1930s, put into practice California's celebrated indeterminate sentencing laws following World War II, and instituted the well-known “bibliotherapy” rehabilitation movement of the 1950s and '60s.

During the 1960s and early '70s, California prisons were the scene of militant political movement among its inmate populations—who maintained a symbiotic relationship with that state's campus radicals, antiwar activists, and political revolutionaries—with San Quentin functioning as the flagship institution in part because of its close proximity to the University of California-Berkeley and the city of San Francisco.

More recently, it was the focus of the nation's shift to the “new penology” of tougher sentencing laws and an incapacitation philosophy in the 1980s, as well as the destination for many men serving [Page 870]sentences under the Three-Strikes Laws for habitual offenders. Finally, mental health practitioners at San Quentin were instrumental in developing the California Personality Inventory (CPI) that measures and evaluates the socialization of inmates.