The California Department of Corrections in the 1960s was operating within a framework that, by contemporary standards, had significant programmatic components: adult education, vocational training, and rehabilitation-oriented programming were officially part of the system’s stated mission, even if the reality of daily prison life bore limited resemblance to the programming. The rehabilitation ideology that dominated corrections policy in the postwar decades had not yet been replaced by the tougher sentencing and mass incarceration policies that characterized the 1970s through the 2000s.
Trejo moved through this system at a moment when it was still theoretically oriented toward the possibility that incarceration could produce changed behavior. He earned his high school diploma in prison. He participated in boxing programs. He found the 12-step program within the institutional context. These were all things that the system, at least nominally, supported.
The specific prisons he moved through — San Quentin, Folsom, Soledad — are the institutions that have become, through literature and music and film, the cultural reference points for California incarceration. Johnny Cash recorded at Folsom Prison. Soledad is associated, in the cultural memory, with the Soledad Brothers — George Jackson and others — and the specific political ferment that California prisons contained in the late 1960s. San Quentin sits on the Bay, visible from Marin County, a monument to what incarceration looks like from the outside.
From the inside, these institutions were environments of sustained and often arbitrary violence, racial hierarchy, and social organization built around the specific codes of prison culture. Trejo has described the world he inhabited in these prisons in his memoir and interviews: the boxing that provided status, the drug use that continued inside, the specific economy of prison social life. He was a participant in that world, not an observer of it. He was incarcerated with people who had done serious things and who were continuing to do serious things, and he was doing some of those things alongside them.