San Quentin – California’s oldest prison – has housed hundreds of executions on death row over the decades.

San Quentin State Prison Once known as “The Bastille by the Bay,” the massive facility overlooking San Francisco Bay housed the nation’s largest death row and became California’s oldest prison in 1852.

“Basically, when officers go in they think they’re working for the toughest prison in the system,” said Don Novi, former head of the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, the state’s prison guard union. “As I remember, all the rooms had open bars.

“When you go to Pelican Bay or other maximum custody prisons, they are basically cells that are closed off with little windows in the cell doors. But in these open-bar settings, all a guy has to do is reach through the bars and stab you.

“In 1978, we had 70 officers stabbed and we had 140 at San Quentin that same year.”

The prison has changed dramatically in recent years, with the death chamber closing and Gov. Gavin Newsom ordering a moratorium on executions. 737 prisoners were then on death row.

To be transferred from a maximum security prison

Much of the focus there now is on training and education, and Newsom announced Friday that the prison will be renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center and transferred from the maximum security prison. Convicts still incarcerated there would be transferred to other state prisons under the plan.

The prison, which occupies 432 acres north of the Golden Gate Bridge and houses about 3,900 inmates, has recently gained notoriety for A covid-19 outbreak During the first months of the epidemic.

It has been visited site since Iconic entertainer From Johnny Cash to Frank Sinatra to Phyllis Diller.

And the prison has a storied and sometimes violent history that includes a Attempted escape in August 1971 Three prisoners and three guards were killed.

But San Quentin was primarily known for its death row, and the prison still houses 546 inmates, including Luis Bracamonteswho shot and killed two Sacramento-area sheriff’s deputies in 2014, and Andrew Mikel, who killed a Red Bluff police officer in 2002.

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San Quentin’s death row was the largest and subject of the nation for years Countless court battles and electoral battles On whether California should carry out the death penalty for condemned prisoners.

More than 400 prisoners have been executed since 1893

The prison was the site of 422 executions, beginning with the hanging in 1893 where 215 prisoners were executed in that fashion.

In 1938, gas chambers were installed at the prison, and by 1967 the prison had gassed 194 inmates, including four women, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The last person to die during that time was Aaron Charles Mitchell, who was convicted of murdering Sacramento police officer Arnold Gamble and dragged into the chamber on April 12, 1967, shouting, “I am Jesus Christ!”

After that execution, court challenges halted the use of the death penalty in California until it resumed in the early hours of April 21, 1992, when Robert Alton Harris was held in the Apple-Green Chamber and Death by gas For killing two 16-year-old boys.

Harris’ execution came amid a flurry of legal appeals that saw him held in chambers twice, once for 12 minutes until a phone call was ordered by the court to halt the process.

Hours later, the court order was overturned and Harris was executed.

California law changed nine months later to allow convicted prisoners to choose between gas or lethal injection, but the latter would die – David Edwin Mason – refuses to make a decision, resulting in him also being executed by gas.

Mason, who was convicted of five murders, waived his right to further court appeals and told The Bee a day before his execution that he would not choose his manner of death, that it would be the state’s responsibility.

He added that he had read about death by gas, including Holocaust studies, and that he was frightened by the prospect but prepared.

“I don’t know much from the time I enter the chamber to the time I leave the holding cell,” he said. “I’m very aware.”

Even after Mason was confined to one of the chamber’s two chairs, he refused all efforts to halt the execution and renew his court appeal, then-warden Daniel Vasquez said.

“No, warden, I want to move on,” Mason told Vasquez. “Thank you, Warden.”

Those were Mason’s last words.

Cyanide gas substituted by lethal injection

After that execution, a federal court in California ruled that execution by cyanide gas was cruel and unusual punishment, and the state turned to lethal injection as its only method.

Then there were eleven prisoners Death by injection Between 1996 and 2006, and in 2007, California began a reconstruction effort that used inmate labor and spent $853,000 to replace the lethal injection site set up inside the old gas chamber.

That new death chamber featured a gurney in the middle of the room with four intravenous tubes leading through a wall to an “infusion control room.”

It also included two clocks, one directly above where a prisoner’s head would be, the other on the wall facing the condemned prisoner.

It has never been used.

A series of legal challenges halted further executions until March 13, 2019, when Newsom A suspension order Stopped the use of capital punishment and the execution chamber in prisons.

Prisons are now places of education, rehabilitation programs

Since then, the prison has greatly expanded its training and rehabilitation programs and has benefited from a location that provides numerous, highly educated volunteers and staff from the Bay Area community, said Michael GoodeLead attorney representing the rights of mentally ill prisoners.

“San Quentin was really a place where people in the system wanted to come because of the programs that were already there,” Bien said. “This is nothing new.

“It has lots and lots of restorative justice programs, it has media programs, all kinds of programs that already exist, so the state doesn’t have to build them from scratch.”

There are rewards in prison Prisoner-produced newspaperA location that makes it easier to attract volunteers and staff and an accredited liberal arts degree program Mount Tamalpais College.

The college currently serves about 300 inmates at no cost to students and has awarded more than 200 degrees, said college founder and president Jody Luen.

“The heaviest lifting for us is getting people to imagine incarcerated people as college students,” LeWen said. “It is much less violent and less racist than other institutions, and (inmates) attribute cultural differences to the presence of educational programs.

“It’s hard for gangs to maintain control when people know each other in the classroom.”

Has been in prison Annual inspection From the staff and coaches of the NBA’s Golden State Warriors, who faced off against the inmate’s San Quentin Warriors team, last September Missing a nail bit83-65.