I live on a hill overlooking the ribbon of freeway that runs along the San Francisco Bay. I also overlook the Bay itself, a rickety boardwalk of homes sticking out into the water, and the parking lot of the ferry that crosses that water. Bookending my view are San Quentin prison to the left and all the way to the right, tucked away at the base of a little mountain, the progressive elementary school where my children spent their first years.
It’s a wonderful view, if a little noisy from the traffic below. In the mornings, the pink rising sun turns the sky and water into my own personal Turner painting. When storms blow in, I can watch bands of rain drift toward the horizon, and in the afternoons, the water is festooned with a flotilla of boats from the local rowing club.
It’s ironic, though, and more than a little troubling to me that the prison and the school face each other with such impunity. If we had more of that, I often say, gesturing to the school, with its gardens, and hot lunches, and art studios, we might have less of that, and I point to San Quentin.
Once, I was in jail myself. Not many people know that about me, but I was for a few weeks. Our local jail is a little further north. I can’t see it from my windows. Actually, no one can really see it because it’s dug straight into a hillside like some medieval fortress or maybe something out of a Kafka novel. No one has ever escaped from this jail. Inside, the only slice of sky is a small semi-circle above the little concrete courtyard they release you into for an hour or two per day, if you’re lucky.
It’s been years and years now, but I think some part of my soul will always be stuck in that little courtyard, circling the drain in the middle, pacing laps around the tall concrete walls, trying to calm my heartbeat. Even after you get released from incarceration, you never really escape, and that is both the point and the whole damn shame of our criminal justice system.
The system is misnamed. It’s definitely criminal, but not always just. People leave on probation, or get shipped to other facilities for longer sentences, or they go out feet first, but everyone comes out a little wonky, blinking in the sudden light, trying to reconcile the inside versus the outside of those places and who you are depending on where you’re standing. The system doesn’t help the people it really needs to and it doesn’t deter the people it should.
I’m so grateful for the expansive view I have now. It allows me to be above the system, both literally and figuratively, to see it from the outside and also from a distance, to get some perspective on the way the wheels and cogs of law and order spin in this country and in my county. Things are not the same for everyone. It depends on who you are and where you’re standing, not so much on what you’ve done. It depends on your color, on your gender, and to a huge extent on your wealth. Perception is so easily clouded by certain slants of perspective.
What you see inside a jail is not the same as what you see outside of it. Who you were before you went in is not the same as who you are when you are spit out. You can debate about whether that is just or deserved. Clearly, some perspective is needed if you’re trying to get someone to change their ways, their minds, their pasts. I just don’t know if that perspective needs to require the price of a human soul. It seems counter-intuitive to break a person completely before you return them to polite society.
But, then, almost everything about the American prison industrial complex is counter-intuitive. San Quentin, a death row prison, sits on one of the most valuable and beautiful pieces of land in the San Francisco Bay. Governor Newsom has plans to transform part of the prison along the lines of a more lenient and progressive Scandinavian model of rehabilitation. There has been plenty of objection to that idea, but in the funhouse logic that is the penal system, you could point out that a lot of the men in San Quentin are there precisely because they’ve already been through the atrocious jail system—often more than once—and it clearly didn’t work the way it was supposed to.
In between the walls of San Quentin and the gates of the little country school full of happy, well-fed, affluent children, there’s a lot of water. Some days, it’s murky and dark. Some days, it’s serene and flat. Either way, it’s an expanse the system can’t or doesn’t seem to wish to cross.
One view of two different worlds. The inside and the outside. An enclosed existence that results from perception with no perspective. A perspective of power that doesn’t allow any inside glimpses lest new perceptions threaten its legitimacy. And stuck in the middle, a whole bunch of people you don’t even see, but live right next to anyway, who, but for the grace of God, might even be you.