Thanh Tran walked out of California’s San Quentin state prison on 11 May 2022 after 10 years behind bars. One month later, he hopped on a plane and flew 5,000 miles away – to Oslo, Norway.
While in prison, Tran co-founded and co-hosted a podcast called Uncuffed, and in one of his first segments recorded as a free person, he toured the facilities of Norway, known for having significantly better conditions and less restrictive policies than seen in the US prison system. He immediately noticed the bright colors, guards playing games with residents, lack of prison uniforms and the huge spaces for rehabilitative programs.
“It was mind-blowing to see officers connecting with incarcerated people and treating them like humans,” recalled Tran, who also spoke at the Prison Radio International Conference while in Norway.
Last week, the governor of California, Gavin Newsom, announced he would be turning Tran’s former prison, the oldest in the state, into the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, focused on education, training and re-entry, and modeled in part after the Scandinavian system. It would be a major change for the 170-year-old San Francisco Bay Area prison complex, which houses 4,000 people, is home to the country’s largest death row and has a long history of human rights violations, including recent scandals involving systemic medical neglect, guard misconduct, overcrowding and solitary confinement and torture claims. It’s also known for its arts programs, college partnerships and newspaper.
The Guardian spoke with Tran and James King – both are former San Quentin residents who are now advocates with the Oakland, California-based non-profit Ella Baker Center for Human Rights – about life inside the prison, Norway’s system and the obstacles Newsom may encounter. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Can you explain the concept behind Norway’s prisons?
Thanh Tran: You can sum up the Norway model with two words: returning neighbors. The expectation is this person will be coming home one day, so what type of neighbor do you want returning? My group visited the Bastoy prison island, Halden prison and Oslo prison, and what I found most impactful was the culture between correctional officers and incarcerated people. Officers need two years of training in social work, and they said they take these jobs to help people. They go in with a lens of social work and care: how do we help people rehabilitate? I saw officers barbecuing with incarcerated people, doing a marathon race with them, exercising with them, hanging out, playing cards, just having a conversation. That was so powerful.
How does the Norwegian environment compare with the California department of corrections and rehabilitation (CDCR)?
Tran: It’s completely different. At the first CDCR prison I went to, most officers wouldn’t even call me by my last name, which I already found dehumanizing. They’d just call me “inmate”, “guy” or “You over there, come here!” San Quentin was a little better, but still the guards are trained not to connect with people: don’t tell incarcerated people your first name, keep a distance. They fear overfamiliarity. When you see an incarcerated person as a father, a brother, someone’s son, someone’s mother, it becomes harder for the officers to Mace them, lock them in the cell every night, hit them with a baton. California officers’ relationship with incarcerated people is a completely adversarial one, whereas Norway is about building relationships.
James King: Let me describe the San Quentin cell: it’s approximately 4ft by 8-9ft long, houses two bunks, a toilet and a sink. An average-sized person can stand in the middle and touch both walls. You share the space with another person, and it’s so small that one person has to get on their bunk in order for the other person to move through the cell. The cells don’t have doors, but bars. So you’re terribly confined with zero privacy. You hear every conversation in the building. It’s loud and chaotic, all day, every day. The design and culture is all about the efficiency of running the institution; institutional needs trump everything. Staff can and will compel people to work at the dining hall or wash dishes or clean tables if the institution needs it. Hundreds of people have to share roughly 15 phones. So people can wait in line for over an hour for 15-minute calls. And the process of doing in-person visits is extremely arduous. There is a scarcity of appointments. And then the visiting room rules say you can briefly hug upon arrival and when leaving, and you can get a disciplinary write-up if the hug is “too long” or a kiss is deemed “inappropriate”. This is all antithetical to creating a humane living environment.
How does the CDCR’s physical environment compare with Norway’s prisons?
Tran: The first thing I noticed in Norway’s maximum-security prison was the colors. There were flowers everywhere, the walls were bright. It was shocking. I also noticed the amount of spaces available for rehabilitative programming – a huge wood shop, a multimedia space for podcasting and a huge library with [books in] over 20 different languages. They cared about incarcerated people’s education. The cells were single-person and at least two times the size of San Quentin’s. Also, incarcerated people wear regular clothes; they don’t have to wear the CDCR blue garb that says “prisoner”, which is so dehumanizing.
What was your initial reaction to Newsom’s announcement?
Tran: I was shocked. I was released last year, and at that time the sentiment among staff was: “Inmates need to remember that they’re inmates.” I felt like the culture was actually becoming stricter, that they wanted to bring back the “punishment” and the “prison” to San Quentin. So there’s a contradiction between what Newsom is saying they’re trying to do and what staff on the ground are saying. When I got to San Quentin in 2018, some called it the “Harvard of prisons”, the place to get rehabilitated. But by 2022, I felt like programs were no longer a priority. I will say I am heartened that Newsom cares and he’s trying to transform the system, knowing how hard it is to change things and how much opposition there is.
King: My sense is people in San Quentin are going to be excited, because it could improve their quality of life. If they don’t think release will be an option for them, they want the best living conditions possible and access to meaningful activities. However, they also unequivocally would prefer to have those opportunities absent their incarceration. Prison does not have to be the vehicle for these services; they’d be much more effective in community environments.
It also feels incredibly ambitious, and possibly even doomed from the outset. The prison is such a harsh environment, consistently overcrowded and antiquated, with buildings over 100 years old. It wasn’t designed for rehabilitation, for classes, for spaces that facilitate healing. There’s an area of the prison for adult continuing education, but it can’t accommodate many people; there are 4,000 people at the prison, so at any given time San Quentin only has capacity to support rehabilitative programming for a fraction of its population. And I don’t know if there’s a feasible way to have people trained by CDCR, who are rooted in a very discriminatory mode of being toward the people they are incarcerating, facilitate a shift in culture.
Are there other lessons from Norway that are relevant to California’s plan?
Tran: I spoke to officers and incarcerated people in Norway who said that in the 90s, there was this investment into the prisons to make them nice and train staff to treat people like humans, but then there were budget cuts, and Norway as a country decided they were spending too much money on incarcerated people. So they became short on staff to run the prisons and implement the talking points. One incarcerated person I talked to had desperation in his eyes and said that there are human rights violations there, but that no one talks about it because Norway is perceived to be the model of progressive prisons. That’s the same thing we could face in California. We can pump a bunch of money into a Norwegian model, but at the end of the day it will still be a prison, and all it takes is a shift in the political wind or a new governor and we go right back to where we started. The real solution is to reduce the population and get people out.
I also think about how Norway has this prison island, but it only serves 100 people, and there are thousands of people in their system. So I am concerned that even if the San Quentin transformation ends up working, what about the nearly 100,000 other people in CDCR? Would California use the existence of one good prison to justify the existence of 30 terrible ones?
How would you like to see Newsom and California move forward?
King: I start with the premise that there’s no humane way to hold people in captivity. It is itself an exercise in violence. I think of a self-help program I did, where I had a wonderful facilitator who helped me connect with my emotions and grow and feel seen. But it was an hour long. And so the other 23 hours of the day would be about perpetuating my captivity or meeting the needs of the institution. There’s no way to fully recognize the humanity of a person who may be serving decades in prison. So if California is genuinely interested in healing and safety and changing the lives of people who have been impacted, it has to start with significantly reducing the amount of time that people spend in prison. And there has to be many more robust alternatives to incarceration. Because the violence of incarceration often does more to destabilize communities and create the conditions for so-called crime. My hope is Governor Newsom continues the work of closing prisons and giving people more opportunities to reintegrate into society.
Tran: If we move forward with prison closures, that’s billions of dollars we’re not spending on incarcerating people – that’s money we can use to invest in our youth so that they never have to go to prison in the first place. It’s pivotal that we reallocate those funds to our communities that desperately need them.
