“Do you want them to come out of prison better rehabilitated with skills, or do you want them to come out worse than what they were to continually feed this model of criminality?” “I’ll ask Californians: What do you want?” he said. San Quentin inmate Juan Moreno Haines said the plan will help ensure taxpayer money is being spent to end the ongoing cycle of repeat offenses. A panel of judges later ordered the state to dramatically reduce the prison population because of overcrowding.Ībout 800 people are released from San Quentin every year, and the goal is to keep them from committing another crime and ending up back in the system, Newsom said. The latest plan is part of a decades-long transformation of the state's sprawling prison system, which went under federal receivership in 2005 after a court determined prison medical care was so lacking it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.

The state spends about $326 million operating San Quentin annually, and Newsom’s administration didn’t say if the new approach would save money. The move by Newsom, who recently began his second term, follows his 2019 moratorium on executions, which drew criticism from some who argued he was neglecting the will of voters who in 2016 upheld the death penalty at the ballot box.įrom 2020 to 2022, more than 100 inmates with death sentences were transferred from San Quentin to other prisons under a pilot program run by the state. He is allocating $20 million to launch the plan. It remained unclear how far the plan would go to reimagine a prison once home to California's most notorious criminals, like Charles Manson, and the site of violent uprisings in the 1960s and 1970s.īut it has also become known for innovative programs where inmates can get a degree, write for an award-winning newspaper, study the arts and get job training in preparation for reentering society.Ī group made up of public safety experts, crime victims and formerly incarcerated people will advise the state on the transformation, which Newsom hopes to complete by 2025.

If San Quentin can do it, it can be done anywhere else.'ĭespite Newsom's ambitious tone, he offered few concrete details on what the new system would look like and who it would serve. 'San Quentin is iconic, San Quentin is known worldwide. 'We want to be the preeminent restorative justice facility in the world - that’s the goal,' Newsom said from an on-site warehouse that will house his envisioned programs. The prison houses more than 2,000 other inmates on lesser sentences. The facility will be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center and the more than 500 inmates serving death sentences there will be moved elsewhere in the California penitentiary system. Gavin Newsom on Friday touted a plan to overhaul the facility in favor of a rehabilitation-centered approach that could become a model for the world. Visiting San Quentin, California's oldest prison once home to a gas chamber used to execute inmates on the nation's largest death row, Gov.

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