Prison Place

 SAN QUENTIN JOURNAL
Prison Makes Way for Future, but Preserves Past
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
 
SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — The dank crypt for the living still wields
Emotional power, its peeling ocher walls and low vaulted ceilings
Suffused with chill and darkness.
 
With its oaken, iron-latticed door and two-foot-thick granite bricks,
San Quentin’s dungeon looks so stereotypically medieval that it might
Have been dreamed up by one of Hollywood’s masters of the macabre.
But as niches for wooden pegs that once secured chains and shackles
Attest, these gloomy catacombs bore witness to “an enormous amount of
Human history, pain, misery and atonement,” said Kevin Starr, the
California historian.
 
As a federal court-ordered overhaul of California’s prison medical
System begins, the storied prison overlooking San Francisco Bay is
Tearing down several outmoded buildings on the 432-acre property,
Including the original 1885 hospital built in the institutional
Italianate style. A $146 million, state-of-the-art primary care
Health services complex will open in 2010.
 
Before demolition, state historians called in to survey the site
Discovered the significance of what had been a forgotten space used
For storage. The space, a dungeon, was the original San Quentin and
Is believed to be the oldest surviving building constructed by the
State.
 
The now-moldering cloister will be preserved because of its
Importance, while demolition proceeds above it. It was completed by
Prisoners in 1854, four years after statehood. “It was the state’s
First public work, before the Capitol building, the roadways, the
Public colleges and universities,” Dr. Starr said. “Its preservation
Is not trivial. Like the catacombs in Rome, it’s where people suffered.”
 
Its history is indeed grim. Originally intended to house 45 inmates,
It was built out of local rock and clay brick quarried by convicts
Living aboard the Waban, a prison ship anchored in San Francisco Bay.
 
More than 150 men were piled into the dungeon’s cells, which were
Sealed off with iron doors with a small slit known as a “Judas hole.”
The men slept on vermin-infested straw matting. “Night buckets” for
Waste were left uncovered. Floggings with a rawhide strap were
Standard punishment, along with “shower baths” — a precursor of water-
Boarding — in which naked prisoners were tied to ladders and then
Sprayed in the face, chest and genitals with a high-pressure stream
Of cold water.
 
In 1869, a visiting physician, Alfred W. Taliaferro, wrote of the
Deplorable conditions: “men literally piled up on one another; this
Fills the room with animal heat and impure air.”
 
The dungeon eventually became a “hole” for solitary confinement,
Modeled on Pennsylvania’s Quaker-inspired system in which isolation
Was viewed as a path to reflection and penitence (thus the term
“penitentiary”). In 1880, the last flogging was officially
Administered at San Quentin and 60 years later, the warden, Clinton
Duffy, abolished the use of the dungeon altogether, removing the iron
Gates as a symbol of reform.
 
Federal historic preservation law requires surveying potentially
Historic structures on state or federally owned property and saving
Those deemed very significant. The Italianate facade of the 1885
Hospital will be incorporated into the new medical facility. The
Dungeon, “a microcosm of how prisoners were treated,” in the words of
Madeline R. Bowen, an architectural historian for the firm Jones &
Stokes, had languished for years until it was unsealed so that
Historians could document it.
 
“There was nothing cleaned up about it,” said Gerald T. Takano, an
Architect who documented the dungeon for the Historic American
Buildings Survey, part of the Department of the Interior. “You can
Still really sense how it was.”
 
Unlike Alcatraz, which has more than a million visitors a year, San
Quentin is still an active prison where convicted killers like Scott
Peterson wait out their death sentences in limbo, as the controversy
Over lethal injection continues. Sgt. Rudy Luna, administrative
Assistant to Warden Robert L. Ayers Jr., said future use of the
Dungeon would be determined once the building is finished and might
Include storage, public tours on a limited basis or “keeping it as is.”
 
Many of his co-workers are unaware of the dungeon’s history, Sergeant
Luna added. “I think it should be preserved,” he said as he escorted
A reporter around the prison yard, which retains its crenellated
Gothic aura. “If you know history, then you won’t make the same
Mistakes.”
 
Although few survive intact, dungeons were a fixture of 19th-century
Prisons, said Norman Johnston, a professor emeritus at Arcadia
University in Pennsylvania and the author of “Forms of Constraint: A
History of Prison Architecture” (University of Illinois Press, 2000).
The concept of solitary confinement, pioneered at the Eastern State
Penitentiary in Philadelphia in 1829 and then repeated later in the
“dark cells” of San Quentin’s dungeon, was developed as a more
effective means of rehabilitation.
 
The reliance on isolation continues in today’s “super-max” prisons,
like the administrative maximum, or ADX, federal prison in Florence,
Colo. “The technology is more advanced but the basic operating
principles are pretty much the same,” said Prof. Craig W. Haney of
the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the author of
“Reforming Punishment: Psychological Limits to the Pains of
Imprisonment” (American Psychological Association, 2006).
 
There is evidence that public fascination with prisons is growing:
Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, for instance, closed to
prisoners in 1971, is now a major tourist attraction that draws
110,000 visitors at Halloween, when it is converted into a haunted
house. The prison’s current “Winter Adventure tours” feature “an hour-
long tour of the beautiful winter cellblocks with an expert guide and
a cup of hot chocolate!” the Web site says.
 
“People want to know what’s behind the wall,” Professor Johnston
said. “There’s a certain morbid curiosity about prisons, just as
there is with automobile wrecks.”
 
In Boston, the historic Charles Street jail has been converted into a
luxury hotel, the Liberty, complete with a restaurant called Clink,
where tapas-style small plates are served amid the atmospheric
original cell bars.
 
Should the dungeon at San Quentin ever be open to the public, even on
a limited basis, it would have much to teach, said Ari Wohlfeiler, an
organizer for Critical Resistance, an advocacy group that opposes
prison expansion.
 
“The history of imprisonment in the U.S. has been marked by poor
conditions, overcrowding and an endless cycle of construction, which
continues to this day,” Mr. Wohlfeiler said. “It would be an ironic
history lesson.”
 
 
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
 
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/us/18dungeon.html?