SAN QUENTIN, Calif. — Rehabilitation inside prison requires more than programs on a schedule. It requires an environment where incarcerated people can move beyond survival, confront the trauma and choices that brought them to prison, build relationships with people outside the walls and begin to believe that a different life is possible.
That is one of the central findings of Amanda Weitman, a longtime San Quentin Rehabilitation Center volunteer whose research into formerly incarcerated people found that community volunteers can play a significant role in helping incarcerated people change how they see themselves, commit to rehabilitation and develop hope that they can successfully return home.
Weitman began volunteering at San Quentin in 2019, initially working in the media center with San Quentin News and teaching financial literacy.
“I started volunteering at San Quentin in 2019 and I started in the media center, San Quentin News,” Weitman said. “I primarily was teaching financial literacy to the guys.”
What began with Thursday night financial literacy sessions expanded into work with several programs, including Arms Down, Bridge the Generational Gap, the Youth Offender Program and No More Tiers. Weitman also became involved with Awareness Into Domestic Abuse, sponsoring the program and facilitating workshops.
Her experience has given her a sustained view of San Quentin’s rehabilitation culture, though she acknowledges that her contact is primarily with people already participating in programming.
“I’ve had a really good experience at San Quentin,” Weitman said. “My experience has been because it has so many rehabilitative programs that it kind of feels like you’re walking onto a college campus.”
She described entering the yard and learning center and seeing incarcerated people carrying backpacks, visiting the library and attending classes.
“They’re all, at least the ones participating in programs, looking to better themselves,” Weitman said. “Just having conversations with the guys who are there, and I know I have a limited view because I’m only working with people who are programming, but they clearly have made that transition to I want to be better and they’re participating in programs to do that.”
Weitman’s research grew out of a dissertation completed through Indiana University’s Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. The project focused on community volunteers working with incarcerated people and their impact on recidivism.
She began with the broader problem of mass incarceration and the interconnected conditions that can contribute to incarceration, including adverse childhood experiences, social isolation, poor educational outcomes, unemployment, homelessness, over-policing and policies that increase the amount of time people spend in prison.
“I was coming in and focusing on how do you break that?” Weitman said. “It’s not necessarily a cycle, but how do you break into that with community volunteers working with the incarcerated?”
As part of the project, Weitman interviewed formerly incarcerated people who had remained out of prison for at least three years without being reconvicted of another crime, the measure she said California uses for recidivism.
A consistent pattern emerged from those interviews.
“What consistently came from the people that I interviewed was sort of a three-step process as to why they think they have done well when they have reentered,” Weitman said.
The first step was a personal turning point.
“They had a moment of change, that there was something that happened that made them say, ‘I need to do something different,’” she said.
That moment did not occur at the same stage of incarceration for everyone.
“For some individuals, it was very early on,” Weitman said. “One gentleman knew that he had to change when he was sitting in LA lockup right after he had been arrested. Other people, it took them like 15 years of being incarcerated before they had that moment of change.”
“But they all had one,” she added. “They knew exactly when it happened.”
The second phase involved seeking rehabilitation programs and immersing themselves in what Weitman described as “right thinking and right acting.” Access, however, varied significantly depending on the prison and security level.
Some initially entered programs for practical reasons, such as getting off a higher-security prison yard or improving their chances of release. Over time, Weitman said, their motivations changed.
“As they started learning about themselves and developing, they realized they started learning for learning’s sake rather than for a specific outcome,” Weitman said. “That’s what they think helped them when they reentered.”
Weitman said another significant finding involved the effect that community volunteers had on how incarcerated people perceived themselves.
“I learned just how impactful interacting with society or community volunteers was to their seeing themselves differently in a positive light,” she said. “That inspiring them to pursue rehabilitation and to give them hope that they actually could be successful when they went home.”
Her research also examined the role of childhood trauma in pathways toward incarceration. Weitman said more than 74% of incarcerated people in the United States have experienced four or more adverse childhood experiences, compared with 17% of the general population.
“There’s a huge discrepancy,” Weitman said. “You can see that things that happened in their childhood has led them to make a choice that landed them in prison.”
She pointed to childhood exposure to domestic violence, parental incarceration and other forms of trauma that children may have little ability to understand or process.
“They don’t know how to process all that trauma,” Weitman said. “If their parents are the ones causing it, it’s not like they can go to them and say like, ‘Hey, I need therapy.’”
The consequences can compound.
“That may lead them to gang involvement,” she said. “It may lead them into substance abuse. It may lead them to not going to school. You can just see this ripple effect of how that’s leading towards being incarcerated.”
Weitman also pointed to social isolation, noting that children experiencing trauma often do not openly discuss what is happening at home.
“You’re quiet,” she said. “You’re not necessarily engaging with other people.”
Those experiences make community relationships inside prison particularly significant, she said, because volunteers can provide contact with people outside the prison system and reinforce the possibility that incarcerated people remain part of a broader community.
That issue has particular resonance for people such as Edwin Chavez, whom Weitman has encountered through her work at San Quentin. Chavez committed a serious crime when he was young but now faces immigration consequences that complicate the prospect of parole and release.
“Well, I think that’s an awful choice when you’re deciding to stay in prison then to be released and have freedom, but then sent to a country that’s not going to treat you well,” Weitman said. “I mean, that’s a really tough position to be in.”
Based on her interactions with Chavez, Weitman said she believes his continued incarceration is unnecessary.
“From my interactions with Edwin, he doesn’t need to be in prison anymore,” she said. “I mean, he’s done that work and he’s a great role model at San Quentin with all the work that he does.”
She credited Chavez with helping Spanish-speaking incarcerated people obtain access to information, including through San Quentin News.
“Edwin’s been very instrumental in making sure San Quentin News has three or four pages of Spanish articles and just including them,” Weitman said. “I just think he is contributing to his community and it’s unfortunate that he feels like he needs to stay in prison to feel safer than going back to a country that he hasn’t been to in decades.”
Weitman said a recent program at San Quentin further illustrated the importance of community, particularly for incarcerated people who experience deprivation that visitors from outside prison can easily overlook.
“We hear music all the time and we see color all the time and everything,” she said. “Just to understand the deprivation that these guys have.”
During the event, she watched incarcerated people respond to familiar music.
“I could look around the room and I could see people mouthing the words to songs that they clearly knew,” she said.
For Weitman, the significance went beyond entertainment.
“I just think it gave them a sense of community and how important that is to their healing is to feel that sense of community, especially when people from the outside are coming in to celebrate with them.”
But rehabilitation does not occur independently of prison conditions. One of the strongest lessons from her research, Weitman said, was how much institutional culture determines whether people can meaningfully participate in programs.
“One other thing that I think was important that I learned is just how important the prison culture is to rehabilitation,” she said.
One formerly incarcerated man described his experience on a Level IV yard.
“I was just trying to stay alive every day,” he told Weitman. “There was no way I would even think about going to a program.”
For someone focused on daily survival, she said, rehabilitation programming could effectively become inaccessible.
“That just was out of the question,” Weitman said.
The contrast helps explain why San Quentin occupies an unusual position within California’s prison system.
“If you’re going to be in prison, San Quentin is the prison to be in if you want to better yourself,” she said. “All of the guys that I interviewed, whether they had spent time at San Quentin or not, highlighted how different, unique and special San Quentin is in the prison system.”
Weitman believes greater public exposure to what happens inside San Quentin could also change how voters understand incarceration and rehabilitation.
“We just need more people going in,” she said. “Now, granted, San Quentin is unique compared to other prisons.”
Without firsthand exposure, she argued, voters can base criminal justice decisions on incomplete or distorted depictions of prison.
“When things hit the ballots, people are making decisions based on what media has told them, which isn’t correct,” Weitman said.
She recalled reading an article about a journalist visiting San Quentin who described wearing a flak jacket but did not make clear that the visit was to death row.
“He went to death row, but nowhere in the article did he say he went to death row,” Weitman said. “He just made it seem like that’s what San Quentin was like.”
“That is not good journalism,” she added.
San Quentin’s transformation into a rehabilitation-focused institution nevertheless faces structural limitations. Weitman noted that California’s prisons operate under common rules regardless of their institutional mission.
“There are 31 prisons and they all have the same rules,” she said. “The fact that they’re a rehabilitation location doesn’t give them a different set of rules.”
“They have the same rules as Pelican Bay, which just kind of ties the hands of the warden and his staff,” Weitman added. “It just makes it more difficult.”
For Weitman, the value of San Quentin’s model lies not simply in individual programs but in creating conditions in which incarcerated people can imagine themselves as something other than prisoners — and in bringing people from outside the walls into that process.
When people ask why she continues volunteering inside a prison, her answer reflects the reciprocal nature of those relationships.
“Because I get so much out of it,” Weitman said. “I don’t know that everybody understands that until they go in and go like, ‘I totally get it.’”
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