Blog

This week we received the first letter from Tim, our Solitary Gardener currently incarcerated San Quentin, since mid-July! The good news is that Tim is feeling better, but he is definitely struggling.

Looking at the 6’x 9’ sculpture of a solitary confinement cell sitting in the smoke of the fires is also to see an urgent question—a reckoning— emerge. When prisoners are called state “resources,” what are the connections between mass incarceration, our overflowing prisons, and the state's need for labor of this sort?

In mid July it was announced that prisoners would no longer have access to phones in San Quentin, to try to control the spread of the Covid-19.

With more than 50% of the people locked up in San Quentin already testing positive, and many more displaying symptoms, the new measures seemed both cruel and too little, too late. Tim and those on death row and in solitary confinement have already been in their cells for 24-hours a day for weeks, sick and utterly isolated. They were denied the ability to call loved ones for the foreseeable future. 

With cases of coronavirus skyrocketing in San Quentin State Prison, (SFChonicle’s headline reads “They’re calling man down every 20 or 30 minutes,”) Tim Young’s worst fears are being realized.

“What we have here is the tale of two knees. Kaepernick used his to make Black Lives Matter. Officer Chauvin used his to make Black lives nonexistent”

Today Tim Young called from San Quentin, where he has been on Death Row for 14 years, to talk about the 8 minutes and 46 seconds that Derek Chauvin kneeled on George Floyd’s neck.

We are relieved to have gotten two letters from the UC Santa Cruz Solitary Gardener Tim Young on Saturday, one dated from March 30. Since he has been writing letters twice a week since the pandemic began about what is happening in San Quentin, it was an uneasy twelve days with no mail.

Our undergraduate intern, Jocelyn Lopez-Anleu, and Solitary Gardener Tim Young have co-curated a playlist for Solitary Garden, the public sculpture and garden project at UC Santa Cruz.

One of the first flowers Tim Young asked us to plant at UC Santa Cruz as part of jackie sumell’s Solitary Garden project was a rose.

We have news from Tim Young, our friend in San Quentin State Prison who is also our collaborator for Solitary Garden, the project by artist jackie sumell which asks us to imagine a landscape without prisons.