CORRECTION: This story has been updated to indicate Cainen Chambers is serving a sentence of 50 years to life for the murder of Ciara Harrison. (April 8, 2023)
SAN FRANCISCO — San Quentin, the oldest-prison in California, will be transformed into a rehabilitation center.
Gov. Gavin Newsom announced this plan during his statewide tour of California in March.
Gov. Gavin Newsom made the San Quentin transformation announcement when he visited the prison to call for a major criminal justice reform.
Cainen Chambers was one inmate who covered the governor’s visit for San Quentin News, the prison’s newspaper and YouTube Channel. Chambers is serving a 50-years to life sentence for the murder of Ciara Harrison, a 25-year-old woman in Moreno Valley.
Chambers has currently served four years of his sentence. He is still grappling with his past actions.
“I want to understand the underlying cause of the factors, the childhood trauma that brought me into the mind state where I could kill someone,” Chambers said.
The 41-year-old is on a waitlist for an intensive therapy program at San Quentin to work on his state of mind. Increases in programs like therapy sessions are at the core of Newsom’s transformative plan.
“The reality is that most of us are going to get out of prison and I think we should invest the most that we can to make sure that these guys not only get out but get changed. You have to get the change before you get out, or it’s just the same cycle,” Chambers noted.
Chambers made a promise to change and better himself to Jill Harrison, Ciara’s mother.
“I reached out to him to find out what happened, and I told him I want you to work as hard as you can to change who you are and I want you to go through a metamorphosis,” Harrison said.
While she supports the shift in focus to rehabilitation and hopes he can change, Harrison knows Chambers has a long way to go before being ready to be released from prison.
“If we get behind the rehabilitation, if we can knock those numbers down and we can make that person rehabilitate in 20 years, they go home, they’re a different influence on their family, then that’s that many people that are saved from repeating the process,” Harrison adds.
The governor’s announcement to transform San Quentin, along with recently closing prisons throughout California, has been criticized by Republican lawmakers.
Assembly member Tom Lackey, R-Palmdale, a former California Highway Patrol officer, believes the governor’s actions send the wrong message to victims and their families.
“[Newsom] believes in an offender’s first and a victim’s forgotten policy, and I find that to be very disturbing,” Lackey said.
Lackey supports rehabilitation efforts in prison but thinks the closing down of prisons has gone a bit too far in trying to find the balance between criminal justice and public safety.
“We’re living in such a polarized atmosphere right now that you’re either extreme this way or extreme that way and that’s not true — I believe the center is where we get good policy and we’re just asking to move a little bit to the victim’s side please,” Lackey added.
Newsom argues he has put plenty of resources toward helping victims and thinks the transformation of San Quentin will actually be to the benefit of victims and their families.
“We have increased the victim compensation fund, we have supported more victims’ services, and this is foundational and this reform at scale, which will be the biggest rehabilitative prison we hope anywhere in the world — certainly in The United States and certainly we’ve never done anything like this in California — that victims will feel respected, their voices heard and they’ll be front and center,” Newsom said.
Chambers hopes the new rehabilitation center would give him more access to resources to become a better man than when he entered.
“I don’t want to get out a day before I’m ready. If the governor were to come right now and say ‘hey, Chambers, you can go home?’ I would say, no, I can’t go home because I’m not ready,” Chambers said.
Newsom has allocated $20 million in the state’s budget to go toward the transformation of San Quentin. Another goal is to have all the inmates on death row transferred to other prisons by 2025.
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