In San Quentin Program, Participants Reckon With Their Pasts and Lobby for Statewide Change

On a recent hot day, in the cool of the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center library, Hugo Campos tells a group of about 10 other incarcerated people the story of his best friend’s death.

Motivational posters cover the walls, and three circles of chairs have been set up around tables.

Campos reads slowly from a written reflection, telling the circle that when he was a teenager, his close friend — the local ‘weed guy’ — was shot during a drug deal gone bad.

“That was a big impact in my life,” Campos said. “I didn’t realize that until I came to prison or until I got to this prompt, honestly.”

Some of the men nod along and shake their heads when he blames himself. The story is familiar. When he finishes, the facilitator, who is also incarcerated, thanks him for his vulnerability and opens up the conversation for comments.

This type of peer counseling session is relatively common at San Quentin these days, where hundreds of volunteers come in every week to help people heal and prepare to reenter society. The prison is so well-known for its rehabilitative culture that Gov. Gavin Newsom last year formally renamed it a “rehabilitation center.” The governor also uses it as the centerpiece for his “California Model,” which focuses on humanizing incarcerated people and normalizing positive interactions between them and the guards.

Where this program is different from other peer-to-peer counseling groups is what will happen with these written reflections. They’ll be typed up and cataloged. Some will be brought to Sacramento to influence state policies pertaining to childhood social welfare issues.

“We actually then work with the participants to leverage their stories for change, for systems change,” said Dr. Jenny Espinoza, co-founder of the program called Back to the Start.

Espinoza and other advocates have identified a need for narratives about child welfare, school discipline, juvenile justice, gun safety — issues that are hard for people in the thick of it to comment on. And they have ready storytellers: men who have been through it all with a lot of free time and a sense of debt to society.

Trying to dismantle the ‘cradle-to-prison pipeline’

For nearly a decade, Espinoza was a primary care doctor at San Quentin before becoming the chief physician and surgeon of California’s prison health care system.

She said she vividly remembers, early in her tenure at the prison, meeting a patient who had Hepatitis C and asking how long he’d had it.

“He just told me very matter-of-factly that when he was 11, his mother stabbed him with a butter knife in the chest,” Espinoza said. He told her that his aunt then injected him with heroin to numb the pain, and he was treated at the hospital with a blood transfusion.

She quickly learned about many more incidents of early trauma among her patients at the prison, including failed foster care placements, abuse and abandonment.

“That was the juncture where I wish I could have made a difference,” she said.

Inside her exam room at the prison hospital, she saw other effects of adverse childhood experiences — referred to clinically as “ACES,” which include experiences like abuse, neglect and seeing family members with substance-use issues, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The more ACES someone has, the greater the likelihood they will experience toxic or prolonged stress during childhood, which can influence brain development, CDC research has shown. ACES are also linked to heart disease, diabetes and mental health issues later in life.

Espinoza said she started the program to influence statewide policies impacting early childhood experiences.

Participants in the program review bills under consideration in the state Legislature, select the policies they believe in and write personal letters to advocate for them.

Close to 30 participants and facilitators meet every Monday in the library to respond in writing to specific prompts about childhood experiences, read their reflections aloud and process them together as a group. Espinoza and another former prison doctor often sit in on the sessions.

Espinoza said by advocating for criminal justice reform, child welfare, violence prevention and education, Back to the Start is trying to dismantle the “cradle-to-prison pipeline” whereby childhood circumstances, poverty and an entrenched school discipline system often set up certain vulnerable people for incarceration.

The group has already had one successful lobbying effort. This summer, facilitator Donald Thompson wrote an op-ed for the San Diego Union-Tribune imploring legislators to preserve funding for foster youth. Espinoza believes this and other narratives were part of the reason the funding was restored in the final budget.

Human, too

Before the sessions start, as men mill around and sign in, 48-year-old facilitator Edwin Chavez introduces himself to outside visitors. Chavez is tall, with salt-and-pepper hair and a ‘San Quentin News’ badge around his neck.

“I’ve been to the worst of the worst, and to me, San Quentin is not prison,” he said.

Chavez has been incarcerated for about 30 years and leads the Spanish-speaking group. He said the culture in San Quentin is different from other California prison facilities. Here, he said, guards call him by his name, not his number.

Chavez was a member of Back to the Start’s first cohort last year. He said he grew up in El Salvador during that country’s bloody civil war and understands the trauma that many in the Spanish-speaking group have experienced. Still, he said he learns more from the other men than he ever expected.

Even if the stories told here never make it out of the library and into the halls of the Capitol, Chavez said, they still make a difference.

“I didn’t even know about the word empathy within myself. Self-empathy, self-love, self-compassion,” he said. “That’s what this group has done for me.”