Written by Meg Brizzolara   

The last time I had to look for a place to live I looked outside of Marin County, a place I’ve lived for thirty years. I moved here from Chicago in 1973 when everyone was moving here; when Marin was a very different place than it currently is.
There were no yuppies then, no BMW’s, no Starbucks or upscale malls and no “bliss ninnies” flipping you off from their SUV’s. on their way to Spirit Rock to hear a talk about inner peace and enlightenment.
I wanted out of here but it was the Dot Com boom and every place for rent in either San Francisco or the East Bay had a line of Eddie Bauer’ed neavoux riche young people on cell phones with thousands more cash in their pockets to put down on a place than I had. I then saw an ad for a two-bedroom apartment in San Quentin Village, a town I always wanted to live in but never saw anything available for either rent or sale and I went for it. I’d driven by here a million times over my time in Marin, on 580 East going to Berkeley or Oakland over the San Rafael Richmond Bridge.
From the onramp after Sir Francis Drake Blvd past the Larkspur Ferry you can see the monolithic prison and the short street of old houses, mostly built before the 1906 earthquake. I’ve always wanted to live someplace that seemed like a time warp in its aged beauty. The presence of the prison never bothered me.
At least not until I moved here.
I moved to San Quentin Village a full six months before I experienced what it’s like to live down the street from the only Death Row in the state of California where they were to execute Donald Beardslee, a head injured man who committed a murder 25 some years ago. Justice is not swift here. My neighbor Michelle, the Chair of the San Quentin Village Association told me what to expect. “You’ll hear singing, mostly from the nuns who are here to protest every execution. They’re from Dominican University, the convent there. Then, after it’s over you’ll hear more singing while people march slowly back to their cars. They’ll be holding candles. If you sleep in the back of the house you won’t hear anything”.
I discover that some of my neighbors rent their parking spaces to major media outlets for thousands of dollars. At first this offended me; how could anyone want to make money from this heinous event? Especially some of these people who live here who have plenty of money anyway.
I’ve since changed my mind.
The day of each execution brings swarms of cops to the neighborhood: CHP, local Sheriff, San Rafael PD, Dept. of Corrections. They bustle about telling you to move your car even if it’s parked in your own space in your own driveway. The first time the CHP officer told me to move my vehicle: “There’s going to be a big crowd here tonight and you don’t want your car to be vandalized!” I tell him thanks for his concern but all the streets are blocked off for miles around, there’s no other place to park even if I was concerned about vandalism, which I’m not, having survived the violence of nuns many years before this, thank you very much.
I call KPFA Radio and tell them they can park in my space since they are “listener sponsored” and don’t have the big bucks the other media outlets do and can’t pay a king’s ransom for a parking space for their van. I let them have the space gratis. Besides, I didn’t pay my last pledge to them, and maybe this will make up for it.
The state does not make it easy to protest this state sponsored murder. They do it late at night on a weekday, usually in the middle of winter when it’s cold, the bitter winds blowing off the Bay. They eliminate parking for miles around. They close the public bathrooms outside the gates, but in a concession to the permits obtained by the groups they install port-a-potties. That’s so anyone with enough machismo or desperation can pull down their pants and hope the stream hits the receptacle; one must aim blindly in the pitch dark.
I decide to open my home to the protestors, some of whom I know. My longtime friends from the Peace Center of Marin on whose Board I sit come every time as do other activist folks I know from around the Bay area, especially Death Penalty Focus, the outfit with which I’m most familiar.
The first execution for which I opened my home was in January of ’04, Donald Beardslee. I make coffee and tea and was not at all prepared for the visitors I would receive, not even really cleaning up the house. Sally Leiberman, the Assembly woman from Sacramento was among the first to avail herself to my central heating, along with Stephanie Faucher from DPF, and Lance Lindsey, the Executive Director. Many others, including Mike Farrell, formerly of M*A*S*H fame. Stalwarts of anti Death Penalty work, all, and I’m honored to help make their work a little warmer.
I learn a lot about the Death Penalty from them. I learn that even though there is still a lot of support for it here in California, a chink in that public support has surfaced lately after the Governor of Illinois, a staunch (and corrupt) Republican issued a moratorium on executions in that state, my home state, after finding numerous problems with it’s application there.
The Death Penalty is racist. It is applied to people of color far more often than it is to whites for the same crimes. It is also classist with few people convicted of capitol crimes able to afford the kind of vigorous defense OJ Simpson got. Few get acquit when the glove don’t fit.
It’s also creepy for some of us who live here and experience ambulances rushing to and from the front gates to take prisoners to Marin General for medical treatment. Stabbings or other mayhem, probably a daily occurrence there. Medical treatment is no longer provided to inmates there, as it once was, with San Quentin prison even having it’s own operating theater. Now all they have is a little infirmary.
I frequently look out from my balcony onto the glorious view of the Bay and it’s surrounding hills; views some pay millions for. But here the view is tainted by what one sees if you look to the right.
A huge building that is crumbling; built in a forgone time, never upgraded or modernized. My next-door neighbor is so disturbed by the sight that she convinces herself it is a “castle”. It does kind of look like one. But I feel obligated to inject reality into her mental and emotional defenses by saying, “But Mary, it IS a prison and people are killed there! Jeez, don’t you know what goes on inside those places? The showers? You know…” I feel a bit like a fresh-faced innocent that doesn’t know about the real evil that men do as I say this. “Yeah, wait ‘til it’s one of your family members!” she says.
But I do know the evil that men are capable of, I just don’t believe the state should be in the business of killing people. Especially when they get it wrong so much of the time.

San Quentin is an anomaly among prisons. It has Death Row with six hundred some people awaiting death, but the rest of the prison is medium security. Mostly drug offenses, parole violators, petty stuff. The work crews made up of inmates do the grounds work, including the removal of trees felled by high winds and brush along the bluff ignored by the County.
The Marin Board of Realtors has been lusting after this property, wanting the prison moved elsewhere, anywhere but here. The property upon which it sits is prime real estate.
The Marin County Supervisor in whose district the prison is located has been trying to get it moved since he was elected. He wants to turn it into a “transit center” with mixed commercial and residential use. He’s been shot down time after time by the state, most recently having his lawsuit (one of two) dismissed. We all joke that we would rather have the prison here than what would amount to a “Steve Kinsey Theme Park”. There’s only one road that goes in and out of here, the traffic would increase tenfold with Kinsey’s idea. The Transit Center that already exists in San Rafael is underutilized.
The day of the 3 executions I have lived here for I notice a palpable tension in the air among my neighbors and the prison employees who go in and out of the Post Office to collect their mail. They don’t look like they feel that “justice is being served”. It appears to be more of a collective guilt, one that remains unspoken, unacknowledged. Jokes are made about “what a zoo it’s gonna be here tonight, eh?” As if the only bothersome thing is the hordes of protestors and the media circus that inevitably follow them.
I still have not recovered from the execution of Stanley “Tookie” Williams, a man there was good reason to believe was innocent. No physical evidence tied him to the crime, blacks were deliberately excluded from the jury pool and his conviction was obtained on the word of a jailhouse snitch that I hear later recanted.
The week leading up to his demise was a circus here; Elvis impersonators camping outside the Post Office, jugglers, doomsday predictors.
The day of his execution brought thousands here to protest. Jesse Jackson and hundreds of others walked here from San Francisco.
Joan Baez needed my bedroom to meditate before going out to the gates to sing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” and shared her veggie chips with us huddled around the 3 teapots and huge dutch oven with soup in it I had made in my tiny kitchen. What a sweet woman! Even did my dishes!
She left me a note saying “Dear Meg- Thank you so much! And it was a good evening. They said Tookie was happy. Love Joan”.
Before the dirty deed was done I looked up from my cup at the table in the kitchen to see a huge man with a paisley scarf walk in. I don’t know this man but his face comforts me as I’m close to tears after hearing that Stanley’s clemency bid was denied. My mother would roll over in her grave if she knew I had Jesse Jackson in my kitchen! She was so enamored with him back in the day when she did civil rights work in Chicago.
I say a little prayer to her: “See Ma, I did good. I kept Hope Alive. I had the Rev in my kitchen. Wish you were here”.
Thousands of people were here outside, many of whom came in to get something hot to drink, sit down and use the bathroom.
I can’t help but notice the chasm between the poorer blacks from all over, here to protest Tookie’s death at the hands of the state and the white middle aged intellectuals who also come to what is being called by Lance from DPF my “safe house” while also protesting. I suspect this execution means different things to different folks depending on where they sit on the food chain that is America.
My friends upbraid me for allowing so many strangers into my home, but I don’t care. It helps me.
The day after the execution there is trash all over the streets, worse than usual. I look out over the filmy water and under overcast skies I pick up some of it, still needing to process what happened last night. I hope Tookie really was happy, like Joan said but I suspect not. They say he shed a tear while the technicians fumbled clumsily, looking for a vein with which to inject the poison that eventually killed him.
The most recent execution just this past Monday was that of Clarence Ray Allen. A man who ordered the shooting deaths of several people to prevent them from testifying in his robbery trial. He was Native American.
Native Americans came in throngs to protest his killing and I suspect this execution again means different things to different people here to protest. Native Americans know better than anyone what kind of playing field America is; level not a word that applies.
They beat their drums loudly and I wonder what the neighbors think about the noise.
I hope it bothers them. I hope it chills everyone for miles to the bone.
I hope these drums can be heard all over the world.