The COVID-19 outbreak of San Quentin Prison shows that we are still trapped in the pit.

The San Quentin Prison has been home to the worst public health crisis in California’s history for some time. As a newly released report by the California Inspector General’s Office, the state transferred inmates from another prison to San Quentin without testing them adequately, sowing an outbreak that killed nearly 30 people and infected more than 2,500 others. I was locked up in San Quentin until October and saw firsthand the horrors of this outbreak, including the deaths of beloved community members, and the long-term consequences of the infection on many others.

During ‘normal’ times, the prison is presented as a symbol of the California Department of Corrections’ commitment to rehabilitation, although most of its educational, self-development, and vocational programs are not available in the other 34 institutions of the system. Due to the proximity of San Francisco, San Quentin is a popular place for free people to tour, with groups coming to jail three or more times a week.

In June 2019, I was part of a group that gave the cast of the Broadway musical Hamilton a tour of San Quentin. They had just started their residence in San Francisco and came to the prison to meet some of the inmates that make up the art community. I remember the phase of the tour that takes visitors to the ‘Dungeon’, a rotting rock and clay structure built by people who were imprisoned in 1854. The Dungeon is now locked up as a seclusion until the 1940s. relic of San Quentin’s criminal and barbaric past. It is a popular stop on the tour route as it makes visitors feel like they can sneak into the experience of the inmates.

We, the tour guides, and they, the tourists, crowded into the dark brick room, with only a little ambient light emanating from a weathered window with an opposite wall. The air inside feels stale, and I begin to think of all the souls that once lived in this icy funeral. The door closes and from the pitch-black silence comes an explosion of nervous laughter. Just as quickly as the discomfort ensues, we all storm out the unlocked door and back into the sunshine of the prison yard.

I could hear choruses of ‘What a relief that we’re out there’ and similar sentiments emanating from the crowd. I could not help thinking of the clever trick that was played on all of us at that moment when the prison yard suddenly felt like a sanctuary.

I could not help thinking of the clever trick that was played on all of us at that moment when the prison farm suddenly felt sanctuary.

The fact that the Dungeon still exists is no fate. In 2009, the state built a $ 136 million five-story hospital on the site of a crumbling brick structure that housed the prison’s reception and release (R&R), the library and the closed Dungeon. The design of the new building, without taking aesthetics into account, left certain aspects of the original architecture intact, showing an unsightly hodge-podge of 19th-century brick on a modern façade. Of the remains that remain, the Dungeon is the only structure that is completely intact – the library and R&R have been replaced by new iterations.

The Dungeon, considered a solemn memorial to San Quentin’s past cruelty, hopes to distract us from the cruelty of the present. Its preservation was deliberate within the design of the new structure – the hospital was a progressive and humane shift in attitude towards prisoners; the Dungeon, as part of the same structure, listens to its antithesis. We empathize with the imaginary prisoner from a distant past, while the presence of the hospital alleviates our fears about the present by suggesting that the institution cares for its residents and helps to heal, calm our analytical tendencies and what our eyes shout at us.

But as San Quentin experienced health experts declaring it to be the second-largest Covid outbreak in the country, the more than $ 1 million hospital structure provided little for the prevention or relief of the people imprisoned in San Quentin. Numerous inmates were sent to hospitals in neighboring communities to receive emergency care, access to ventilators and ICU beds. It may therefore be left to wonder what is the function of the hospital not to provide medical care.

At the same time that the new health care facility in the prison does not have a functioning hospital that cares for adequate inmates, San Quentin’s archaic housing structures – massive cell blocks packed with people locked up in poorly ventilated, unhygienic and poor conditions – have in every way accelerating and exacerbating the spread of the virus through the prison.

The COVID crisis makes it clear that the Dungeon is not a remnant of an inhuman past, but a symbol of how little things have changed. In some ways, the conditions got even worse. In his time, the Dungeon’s fourteen cells of 12 by 6 feet contained 45 people; today, more than 2,200 people tested positive for COVID-19 in San Quentin while locked in cells. For the past 11 months, prisoners in San Quentin have been restricted to 23 hours a day from living on 4½ to 10½ feet due to the closure imposed due to the COVID pandemic in all California prisons. This exclusion did little to help the influx of the virus, which affected all 35 state agencies.

The use of symbols to create simplistic narratives about our past tries to cause collective memory loss and critical analysis. After all, prisons are seen as a human alternative to hanging, torturing, or other forms of corporal punishment. This story of progress can not recognize, or as far as it is concerned, the parallels between public execution and death by COVID, or between the Dungeon and the SHU – an issue of the 18th century reformer could ever think – mass confinement.

The arc of history is not linear, and despite our shared fantasy of progress, our tomorrow is not always better than today. A new era of activists is beginning to investigate the removal of symbols that shape and sustain harmful stories from our country’s past and that underlie violent power systems. Many Americans are beginning to realize that the Confederate monuments are tools for a revisionist and unscrupulous history that seeks to eradicate systemic violence. CDCR uses the Dungeon for a similar purpose, as a symbol of evolution from the era of cruel punishment to an era of human rehabilitation. Artists, such as those in San Quentin, understand the story work; that it is not only your focal point, but also your vantage point that determines what is obscured and what becomes visible.

In October 2019, the cast of Hamilton returns to San Quentin to watch a performance of the Shakespeare theater group. After the show, many of us who were part of the tour came along with the cast and shared news and reflections about the experience we had. I eagerly sought out the company manager, with whom I spent a lot of time on tour. She explained how moved she was to see the level of humanity that exists here on the inside. “Can I give you a hug?” she asked through damp eyes. I nervously replied, “This is probably not a good idea,” looking into the eyes of correctional officers looking for prisoners violation of the rules of fame. My mind takes me back to the darkness, the panic and fear that I feel not only in the Dungeon, but in every breath of my confinement.