Cover story: Behind the walls -- Menlo Park man brings tennis, Freud -- and perhaps a chance to be better human beings -- to the men at San Quentin State Prison Cover story: Behind the walls -- Menlo Park man brings tennis, Freud -- and perhaps a chance to be better human beings -- to the men at San Quentin State Prison (August 11, 2004)

By Rebecca Wallace
Almanac Staff Writer

Every Wednesday morning, retired teacher Don DeNevi drives from his Sharon Heights home up to Marin County, where he discusses personality theory with two men.

They talk about Freud and Jung and Maslow, with Mr. DeNevi presenting the ideas in simple language, and the men think about the currents of their own lives. Some Wednesdays the men seem clear-headed; on others, disturbed and depressed. Every Wednesday they're in cages.

The two men are on death row at San Quentin State Prison. Even when they're allowed out of their East Block cells to meet with Mr. DeNevi, they're still locked in individual cages in the visiting room.

Wrapped in the deepest levels of incarceration, they're still not beyond personal insight, Mr. DeNevi says.

He recalls one of the men saying, still holding fast to the belief that he'll go home: "When I get out I mean to do some good. If I don't, at least I'll have understood the nature of my demons."

An educator, counselor and author, Mr. DeNevi has taught since 1959 in many disciplines, such as criminal justice at San Francisco State University and psychology in the Peralta Community College District in Oakland. He's also taught many a course behind bars, including GED instruction at Salinas Valley State Prison and "Understanding Ourselves" at the Marin County Jail.

Now retired from teaching, he counsels the death-row inmates as a volunteer and has been on San Quentin's staff as supervisor of recreation since 2002, leading sports teams, a book club and other programs. Many participants are medium-security prisoners with the possibility of parole.

It's part of a perpetual fascination with helping to rehabilitate these men, or at least give them something positive. Men, he says, who typically are either very sick or did something stupid in their younger years.

"Virtually all are immature, egocentric, defensive, angry, lonely, neurotic -- yet within most there is a deep character," Mr. DeNevi says. "If only that character strength can be brought out, released, respected, put to creative work."

As a teen, Mr. DeNevi admired a psychologist character in the 1952 movie "My Six Convicts," a man who worked with inmates to find decency and kindness in them. Mr. DeNevi has never forgotten the film, even as time has taught him that do-gooders don't always succeed and a deep character -- or even decency -- can't always be found.

His greatest failure, he says, was trying to teach a group of neo-Nazis a course on the Holocaust.

"They loved all the footage of the camps. That was a disaster," he says.

'It's a city'

In a parking lot outside San Quentin, the air heavy with seagulls and damp, visitors can hear the death-row inmates yelling in their exercise yard.

Watchtower One, built in 1933, hovers above the tangle of battered prison structures on Point Quentin overlooking San Francisco Bay. One building has Gothic-arched windows like a castle.

Vernell Crittendon, a prison spokesman, ushers Mr. DeNevi and an Almanac reporter and photographer toward the first of many security checkpoints.

"We have a no-hostage policy," Mr. Crittendon tells them. "If you're taken hostage, the state of California will not recognize you as a bargaining tool." The reporter and photographer are not sure how to respond.

Inside, Mr. Crittendon takes on the air of a museum docent, pointing out cell blocks ("our gated community"), the three death-row areas, and the brick 1885 hospital building. This was the first hospital built in a state prison, he says proudly. The prison itself, which now holds about 6,000 inmates, dates back to 1852.

The Almanac visitors are not allowed on death row; instead, Mr. Crittendon takes them through courtyards and the exercise area where medium-security convicts walk freely, dressed in blue or gray. New arrivals from county jails arrest the eye in bright orange. They stare at visitors, while those who have been at San Quentin longer seem less interested, merely going about their day.

Men who opt to be productive during their time in prison, rather than just sitting in their cells all day, are said to be "programming." Because of this record of good behavior, many inmates may be under medium, not maximum, security, even though some have been convicted of murder. During the day, they're attending literacy class, learning a trade, taking parenting courses or painting in the art room. Some play on Mr. DeNevi's sports teams. Instead of wearing handcuffs, they carry brown-bag lunches.

"It's a city," Mr. Crittendon says, spreading his arms wide. "Everything that happens in a city we duplicate within these walls."

In the sprawling, windy recreation yard, an inmate in a T-shirt dangles from an exercise bar over asphalt, near the baseball field with grass donated by the San Francisco Giants. They gave baseball uniforms, too, Mr. Crittendon says: "We quickly took off the SF and put on an SQ."

Mr. DeNevi points out an expanse of gravel, saying, "We're getting bocce lanes right here." He then calls out to two inmates with baseball hats and goatees, "Bert! Curly Joe!"

On Saturdays, Mr. DeNevi brings in various sports teams from the community to play with the inmates. There are church and city squads, college teams and, soon, the first ping-pong team.

This is Tuesday, and Bert and Curly Joe are looking forward to the weekend, when they play on the tennis team. Bert has been at San Quentin for 10 years and is up for parole soon, while Curly Joe's been in for 22 years. Tennis was certainly not part of their pre-prison lives.

"I started playing in here in '82," says Curly Joe, bespectacled with a pen in his shirt pocket. "It was completely new to me. I was swinging like a girl."

Aware of the reporter present, Bert howls with laughter. "You can't say that!"

Mr. DeNevi joshes Bert about his skills with a tennis ball: "Nobody hits it harder."

"Yeah, about 100 mph," Bert proclaims.

The two then grow quiet as Mr. DeNevi talks about something he's encountered here that people might not expect: the strong sense of integrity among the inmate-athletes. He says he's found countless umpires, referees and players behind the walls of San Quentin who always follow the rules.

"It feels good for somebody to say kind words," Bert says. "It's part of one's growth that someone accepts you for who you are."

The three speak just as seriously about the community athletes who play at San Quentin, several of whom were afraid to come at first. Guards keep a close eye on all visitors, Mr. DeNevi says, and Bert pipes up: "We protect 'em. They'll be all right."

Suddenly, there is shouting, and Bert and Curly Joe turn and run toward a picnic table. Heads whip around, but the crisis is merely a link in the food chain: seagulls have swooped down to eat Bert and Curly Joe's brown-bag lunches.

The importance of leisure

A few years ago, you wouldn't have wanted to play a game of bocce at San Quentin. It was a rougher place, prone to fights and violence, says Mr. Crittendon, who gives a vivid play-by-play account of a 1971 inmate uprising that left three guards and three inmates dead. Needless to say, "rehabilitation" was not a word one casually threw around.

These days, though, many officials say there's less of an emphasis on controlling the inmates and more on improving them.

"We're on the cusp of that change," says Jean Bracy, supervisor of correctional education at San Quentin. She oversees the academic, trade, volunteer, library, and arts programs along with recreation.

For her, teaching positive ways to fill leisure time isn't just allowing convicts to goof off; it's a crucial "spoke in the wheel" for turning an inmate into a better human being.

"Think about it: when do we get in trouble? It's when we're not working or going to school," she says.

Ms. Bracy says Mr. DeNevi has played a key role in improving recreation at San Quentin. "He talks to them about their wellness and their fitness and protecting themselves from the sun," she says. In addition, the community athletes he brings in are positive role models, she adds.

Mr. DeNevi also regularly seeks donations for the program that the state won't kick in for, Ms. Bracy says. That money keeps recreation at San Quentin far ahead of the "good old days," as one inmate ironically wrote in a letter to Mr. DeNevi -- a time when the tennis net was a 5-foot chicken wire fence and the few tennis balls had been used so often they'd lost their fuzz.

"Every member of the tennis team works hard at preserving that trust that the coach has given us," the inmate wrote.

That trust also extends off the court. Mr. DeNevi often writes letters to the parole board on behalf of inmates, focusing on seeing the men as they are now, not as they were.

But it's not always easy to see the good in people when you know the full story. Although Mr. DeNevi has known some of these men for years, he doesn't find out why "his convicts" are incarcerated. He knows he has to separate himself. Particularly when he enters East Block, where the two men he counsels live with 400 other condemned inmates.

"I'm afraid that if I read their files and find out how heinous their crimes were it'll color my perception of two men who want to learn," he says.

Strong though his convictions may be, there is one issue on which Mr. DeNevi remains conflicted: the death penalty.

"There are men on death row who I would personally pull the trigger or lever on," he says. Then his brow furrows.

Some days after being interviewed by an Almanac reporter, he returns to the issue in a follow-up note:

"Every instinct I have wants to execute those who engage in cold-blooded, pre-meditated, systematic murder, especially of children," he writes. "Yet, as I come to work with them, and get to know them, I realize they are simply very, very sick human beings.

"I try to remind myself that not one of them said at the age of 3 or 4, 'I can hardly wait to grow up to kill people.'"

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