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

The San Quentin State Prison was, for some time, the site of the worst public health crisis in California history. As a report recently released by the Office of the Inspector General of California details, the state transferred people incarcerated from another prison to San Quentin without properly testing them, sowing an outbreak that killed about 30 people and infected more than 2,500 others. I was incarcerated in San Quentin until October and witnessed the horrors of this outbreak firsthand, including the deaths of dear community members and the long-term impacts of the infection on the health of many others.

During “normal” periods, 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 at the other 34 institutions in the system. Because of its proximity to San Francisco, San Quentin is a popular place for free people to take a tour, with groups entering the prison three or more times a week.

In June 2019, I was part of a group that took the cast of the Broadway musical, Hamilton, on a tour of San Quentin. They had just started their residency in San Francisco and went to prison to find some of the incarcerated people who make up the internal artistic community. I remember the phase of the tour that takes visitors to the “Dungeon”, a structure of decomposing stone and clay bricks that was built by people imprisoned in prison in 1854. Used for solitary confinement until the 1940s, the Dungeon is now framed as a relic of the punitive and barbaric past of San Quentin. It is a popular stop on the tour route, as it allows visitors to feel that they can crawl into the prisoners’ experience.

We, the tour guides, and they, the tourists, gathered inside the dark brick chamber, with only a sliver of ambient light emanating from a distant window with bars facing an opposite brick wall. The air inside seemed to be addicted, and I began to imagine all the souls that once resided in this icy tomb. The door closed and, out of pitch black immobility, there was an explosion of nervous laughter. As quickly as the unrest started, we all ran out of the unlocked door and back into the prison courtyard sun.

I could hear choruses of “What a relief we got out of there” and similar feelings emanating from the crowd. I couldn’t help thinking about the clever trick that was being played on all of us at a time when the prison yard suddenly looked like a sanctuary.

I couldn’t help thinking about the clever trick that was being played on all of us at that moment when the prison yard suddenly seemed sanctuary.

The fact that the dungeon still exists is not an accident of fate. In 2009, the state built a $ 136 million 5-story hospital on the site of a dilapidated brick structure that housed the receipt and release (R&R) of the prison, library and then-closed dungeon. The design of the new building, curiously, and without regard for aesthetics, left certain aspects of the original architecture intact, creating an ugly mixture of 19th century bricks transposed into a modern facade. Of the remnants that still exist, the Dungeon is the only structure completely intact – the library and R&R have been replaced by new iterations.

The Dungeon, heralded as a solemn memorial to San Quentin’s past cruelty, hopes to distract us from the brutality of the present. Its preservation was intentional within the design of the new structure – the hospital representing a progressive and human change in attitude towards prisoners; the Dungeon, as part of the same structure, listening to its antithesis. We empathize with the imaginary prisoner from some distant past, while the hospital’s presence alleviates our fears about the present by suggesting that the institution is caring for its residents and helping them heal, calming our analytical inclinations and what our eyes shout at us.

But as San Quentin experienced what health experts have proclaimed to be the second worst Covid outbreak in the country this summer, the multimillion dollar hospital structure provided little in the way of prevention or relief for those incarcerated in San Quentin. Countless prisoners were sent to hospitals in neighboring communities to receive emergency care, access to ventilators and ICU beds. So, we were wondering: what is the hospital’s role if not to provide medical care?

While the prison’s new health center lacks a functioning hospital that provides adequate health care for incarcerated people, San Quentin’s archaic housing structures – huge cell blocks filled with human beings confined in poorly ventilated conditions, unhealthy and miserable – it seems that it accelerated and exacerbated the spread of the virus throughout the prison.

The COVID crisis makes it clear that the Dungeon is not a vestige of an inhuman past, but a symbol of how little things have changed. In a way, conditions got even worse. In its day, the fourteen cells in the 12 by 6 feet dungeon accommodated 45 people; today, more than 2,200 people tested positive for COVID-19 in San Quentin while they were locked in cells. In the past 11 months, people imprisoned in San Quentin have been confined in residential spaces measuring 4 ½ by 10 ½ feet for up to 23 hours a day due to the blockade imposed by the COVID pandemic in all California prisons. This blockade did little to stem the tide of the virus, which hit all 35 state institutions.

The use of symbols to create simplistic narratives about our past seeks to induce collective amnesia and bypass critical analysis. After all, a century ago, prisons were seen as a human alternative to hangings, torture or other forms of corporal punishment. This narrative of progress fails to recognize the parallels between public execution and death by COVID, or between the Dungeon and the SHU, or by the way – an exaggeration in the 18th century reformer could have imagined – mass incarceration.

The arc of history is not linear and, despite our collective fantasy of progress, we will not always be better tomorrow than we are today. A new era of activists is beginning to examine and call for the removal of symbols that shape and sustain harmful narratives from our nation’s past and that support violent systems of power. Many Americans are beginning to recognize that Confederate monuments serve as tools for a revisionist and sanitized history that seeks to erase ongoing systemic violence. The 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, like those of San Quentin, understand the work of narrative; that it is not only its object of focus, but also its point of view that determines what becomes obscure and what becomes visible.

In October 2019, Hamilton’s cast returned to San Quentin to attend a performance by the Shakespeare Theater troupe. After the show, many of us who had been part of the tour met with the cast to share news and reflections on the experience we had. I anxiously sought out the company manager, with whom I had spent a lot of time during the tour. She explained how moved she was to see the level of humanity that existed here. “Can I hug you?” she asked with moist eyes. I replied nervously, “It’s probably not a good idea,” my eyes searching for cops looking for prisoners violate the rules of superfamiliarity. My mind taking me back to the darkness, panic and fear that I felt not only in the Dungeon, but in every breath of my imprisonment.