San Quentin State Prison

San Quentin State Prison, historically the best known name for the institution now officially called the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, is a California state prison for men located in Marin County north of San Francisco. Established in 1852 and opened in 1854, it is the oldest prison in California and one of the oldest continuously operating prisons in the United States, occupying 432 acres on San Francisco Bay. For most of its history the prison held California's only death row for men, at one point the largest in the United States, though the state's condemned population has since been transferred elsewhere, and its execution chamber, which used lethal gas until 1993 and lethal injection until 2006, has not been used since. In 2023, under a rehabilitation initiative led by Governor Gavin Newsom, the prison was renamed and reoriented toward education and rehabilitation programs rather than the purely custodial and, historically, capital punishment role for which it had long been best known.