Two years on, San Quentin has become, once again, less about rehabilitation and keeping humans safe, and more about packing incarcerated men into crowded spaces for revenue, despite an ongoing pandemic which has exploded into yet another outbreak.
The thing about the past is that it has a way of infringing on the present. There is absolutely no accountability for prison officials. If it’s true that to err is human and to forgive is divine, then the people who control our justice system and its prisons must be the “gods” they believe themselves to be. They accept no responsibility when it comes to their own error. This age of progressive hegemony, which is called “moral clarity” — it’s very one-sided.
All that is here are people with health problems and disabilities, most due to old age. The CDCR and White corporate media want the general society to believe we (the incarcerated) are a throw-away disorderly class of people, while through another lens hailing S.Q. as a flagship for other prisons across the state in its progressive status in rehabilitation.
Marin County Superior Judge Geoffrey M. Howard’s judgment was very short-sighted and wholly biased by not ordering relief for trauma and hardship of SQ’s population by simply single-celling humans for lack of ventilation inside housing units due to COVID-19 and 29 deaths.
It’s time to recenter the narrative. The real central question is whether the state has made any progress for the human rights of the incarcerated.
I am not trying to leave San Quentin horizontally.
Previous Columns
The Gruelling Report Issue 1
The Gruelling Report Issue 2
The Gruelling Report Issue 3
The Gruelling Report Issue 4
The Gruelling Report Issue 5
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Republish this article
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Here are our ground rules:
- You must credit Prison Journalism Project. In the byline, we prefer “[Author Name], Prison Journalism Project.” At the top of the text of your story, please include a line that says: “This story was originally published by Prison Journalism Project” and include a link to the article.
- No republishing of photographs, illustrations or graphics without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No editing the content, including the headline, except to reflect changes in time, location and editorial style. For example, changing, “today” to “last week,” or San Quentin to San Quentin, California. You can also make minor revisions for style or headline size, and you can trim stories for space. You must also retain all original hyperlinks, including links to the Prison Journalism Project newsletters.
- No translation of our stories into another language without specific permission. Please contact inquiries@prisonjournalismproject.org.
- No selling ads against our stories, but you can publish it on a page with ads that you’ve already sold.
- No reselling or syndicating our stories, including on platforms or apps like Apple News or Google News. You also can’t republish our work automatically or all at once. Please select them individually.
- No scraping our website or using our stories to populate websites designed to improve search rankings or gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
- Any site our stories appear on must have a prominent and effective way to contact you.
- If we send you a request to remove our story, you must do so immediately.
- If you share republished stories on social media, please tag Prison Journalism Project. We have official accounts on Twitter (@prisonjourn), Facebook (@prisonjournalism), Instagram (@prisonjournalism) and Linked In.
- Let us know when you share the story. Send us a note, so we can keep track.
The Gruelling Report Issue 6: Wash, Rinse, Repeat
