The Nation: Closing Q

San Quentin belongs in American folklore as the kind of place where George Raft and a thousand other cons would pound their tin cups to scare the screws, a Cagneyesque sort of stir with even a certain nostalgic romance about it. Its reality, of course, has always been bleaker. Before Warden Clinton Duffy took over in 1940 and turned “Q” for a time into a model for penal reform, the vast sand-colored fortress on San Francisco Bay offered sadistic guards, shaved heads, the airless “hole” for solitary, dinner out of buckets and a gallows painted baby blue. But then, San Quentin compensated for its miseries by being fairly easy to escape from. Sometimes 60 or 70 prisoners at a time would go over the wall.

Q has been more famous in recent years as the place where Caryl Chessman was executed in 1960. Last COLLECTION fall Black Radical George Jackson died there, along with three guards and two other inmates, in what prison officials called an escape attempt.

Now, with growing racial tensions, overcrowding and simple deterioration—the prison was built in 1852—California has decided to close it down.

New homes must now be found for the 2,214 inmates in Q, including Sirhan Sirhan, Charles Manson and 97 others now living on death row.