Folk
Concert
featuring
The
Sweets Mill
String Band
and Don Ross
8 p.m. Erb Memorial Union Ballroom $1.00
Saturday October 16
sponsored by ASUO & University Folk Music Club
Bananas
UsOANo I
Potatoes
Turkeys
Ground Beef
'ST* »ens
J° f° 14 lb
Grade
h . cent Beef m a
5a
Townhouse
Tomato Sauce .o,c,„9c
Campbells Soup !5e
Cream of Chicken 10,/2 oz- Can
Chicken Noodle
Cream of Mushroom
Oven Joy Broad 4 $1
22' 2 oz. loaves
Lucerne
Cottage Cheese p.n,29e
I ibby's
Tomato Juice .^ J1
Hamms Beer < 1 B<.. 99e
Prices Effective: Thurs. - Fri. - Sat. Oct. 14, 15, and
16th. Store Hours: 9:00 a.m. to 10 p.m. everyday at
Safeway in Springfield and Eugene at 145 E. 18th, 1156
Hwy. 99N, 845 W. 6th, 1840 E. 13th, 1625 Harlow Rd„
L jtQth and Donald and River Road.
San
Quentin:
a
ove
to
the
desert?
SAN QUENTIN, Calif.—The prison stands on a
tip of shoreline with a spectacular view of San
Francisco Bay and Mt. Tamalpais to the north.
Some of the 2,600 inmates can enjoy the spec
tacle of two bay bridges, a ship cracking the
shimmering reflection of sunlight on the water or
the moon hanging over the mountain.
Others have only a view of the yellow and beige
within the walls or of barbed wire entaglements,
gun towers and bars.
The hundred men held in what is
euphemistically called the “adjustment center,” a
prison within the prison for men considered too
dangerous to mix with the general inmate
population, have no view at all.
They are truly caged men, searched carefully
whenever they go to see a visitor and fed through a
slot in the bars. Yet a gun was smuggled into the
adjustment center and six persons were killed in an
escape attempt Aug. 21.
That episode raises anew several questions
about the future of San Quentin, which was
established in 1852 and is the oldest of California’s 13
prisons.
By Daryl Lembke
<C) 1971, The Los Angeles Times
Has it outlived its usefulness?
Should the inmates be moved and the old pile of
brick and mortar be demolished?
What kind of an institution should replace it?
What kind of prison can contain the current inmate
crop of revolutionaries?
The violence is nothing new but now it has taken
a new shape.
Since the first cellblock was completed in 1854,
the prison has witnessed a parade of dramatic
events.
Thomas McFarland Foley was sent to San
Quentin on July 1, 1854, to serve a three-year sen
tence in the Killing of John Dunn, a San Francisco
newspaper editor, but he did not stay long.
An adventurer named James Estell had been
awarded a lease to establish the prison and use
I
convict labor for his own gain. Estell did not think
Foley was guilty so he gave him special treatment.
He let him sleep in the guards’ boardinghouse and
two weeks after the convict’s arrival, gave him a
gun and made him a guard.
Roley repaid the kindness by walking away
from the brickyard, where he had been assigned to
keep the prison hogs away from soft bricks. He left
behind a note promising to pay back the $500 he had
taken with him from the prison safe.
Flogging inmates at San Quentin was com
monplace up to 1940, when Gov. Culbert Olson
removed members of the prison board for ordering
the whipping of inmates.
Profiteering and mistreatment of prisoners
were also routine in the early years.
There were food riots, frequent use of the
dungeon for punishment and many celebrated
hangings. Some of the big names of crime resided at
San Quentin, often temporarily until their date with
the noose or the gas chamber. In recent years, the
best known were Barbara Graham and Caryl
Chessman, both executed in the gas chamber after
lengthy (12 years for Chessman) appeals.
The biggest break in San Quentin’s history
occurred in 1935, when four armed inmates beat
Warden James (Big Jim) Holohan to death and
escaped, taking with them the entire parole board.
Two of the parole board members were
wounded in the wild chase but the hostages were
finally rescued and inmates captured near
California’s Tomales Bay.
The last execution by hanging in California took
place at San Quentin in 1942, four years after the gas
chamber had been installed.
Louis Nelson, the present warden, has been
confronted with serious challenges in his long
career, but none have been as baffling as his
present quandary of how to control dedicated
revolutionaries in prison.
Mounting violence at me prison, loppea Dy uie
bloody attempted escape in August, has spurred
demands in northern California’s Marin County to
level the prison and build a maximum security
institution elsewhere to replace it.
The Marin County Human Rights Commission,
which inspected San Quentin after the August
escape attempt, found it to be “an antiquated
structure by design and construction, incapable of
providing proper security and sanitation.”
Fred Mayer, a pharmacist who is commission
chairman, urges that Raymond Procunier, State
Director of Corrections, look for a maximum
security prison site “away from suburbia, out in the
desert or boondocks.”
“We should put all the tough guys in one place,
where they could be watched by closed circuit
television, guarded closely and kept away from
people,” said Mayer.
Jim Park, San Quentin Associate Warden, is
inclined to agree.
“Ideally, we should get the hoodlums and
revolutionaries out of this increasingly populated
area and make this a psychiatric and medical
facility,” he said.
Procunier, a short ruddy-faced man with steel
gray hair and a disarming style of speaking can
didly to newsmen, is against building an armed
fortress “super prison” for the 600 to 1,000 un
manageable inmates in the state prison population
of 22,000.
He said it is too hard to determine which in
mates offer no hope of “rehabilitation” and
therefore should be assigned to such a dead-end
lockup.
“People are always saying we ought to move
these places out in the middle of the desert, but you
can’t get a staff to move out there,” said Nelson.
The warden, who lives in family housing on the
44-acre prison grounds with about 100 of the 300
guards, makes no apologies for San Quentin's
buildings.
“We can run an adequate program at San
Quentin and we do,” he said. “The housing is an
tiquated, but it’s no worse than 75 per cent of the
other prisons in this country. . .”
Times-Washington Post News Service
--
COMING SOON
At the College Side Inn
Dimers -- Monday nights 8:30 to 10 p.m.
Trirwrlo ——'^ere wor*<ing on this one. Come out and ask how it‘
■ ■ IvjwIC HiIvCS going, and have a beer while you're here.
The College Side Inn
6431 College View Road
746-9302
If you don't know where it's at—
ask a friend.
—i.