In this California prison, inmates who cook for their guards and others ‘rely on each other’

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Through many metal gates, across an active exercise yard, past cyclone fences topped with curled barbed wire, at the end of a row of neglected warehouses at the California State Prison Solano, there is an incongruous sight: a restaurant.

The cooks are men serving time for murder and drug and gang-related crimes. They built the restaurant and then learned how to dice jalapeños not from culinary school graduates but from members of Delancey Street Foundation , a self-help residential program for ex-addicts, alcoholics and convicts that has operated in San Francisco for over a half a century. Smaller Delancey Street facilities operate in Los Angeles, New Mexico , North Carolina, South Carolina, New York and Massachusetts.

Unlike most of the California prison system, where there are gang controlled white showers, Black showers and Latino showers, white tables for eating, Black tables and Latino tables, in this open kitchen, the men in starched chef jackets, who are Black, Latino and white, work together.

While California and other states promote normalization — an effort to make prisons more closely resemble the world outside — the restaurant in the prison in Vacaville, 50 miles northeast of San Francisco, is proof that change can happen.

On a Tuesday in June, a correctional officer who processes arriving inmates, enjoyed a sourdough patty melt with a side order of fried pickles with Sriracha aioli. “I work long, crazy hours,” Officer V. Fera said, referring to her 16-hour shifts, and until this restaurant opened, there was no place to get “healthy, homemade food.”

The restaurant, with 52 seats, is open only to correctional officers, prison administrators, plumbers, teachers, doctors, gardeners and others who work at the prison and to people who work at a nearby state prison called the California Medical Facility.

In the kitchen, Shaylor Watson, 55, imprisoned for two murders he committed when he was 17 and 18, calls himself “the master of tomato soup.” He was completing his day’s work, soaking and sanitizing his knives, which, for security, are tethered to his workstation. “This is my way of making amends for the harm I caused,” he said.

Nearby, Justin Miller, who is Latino and has been in an out of institutions on drug charges since he was 13 and has tattoos climbing up his neck, stood with Ray Williams Jr., a Black inmate who has spent 24 of his 43 years in prison for first degree murder, as they bantered and managed the kitchen.

“Our idea is to teach them skills and teach them how to be decent people even though they’re in a horrible place where decency doesn’t get you far,” said Ramiro Mejia, a Delancey Street graduate who for eight years managed the prison unit.

“These guys get the experience of what it’s like to be a human again,” said Tobias Gomez, a Delancey Street graduate and manager of the prison restaurant.  “This wouldn’t be possible anywhere else,” he said.  At the restaurant and their cell block there are “no gangs, hatred, racism or segregation,” Gomez said.

Early concerns that correctional officers would not eat what the inmates make have dissipated. Guards, nurses, administrators and maintenance workers have been won over by the $10 buttermilk crispy fried chicken sandwiches with homemade slaw, the $15 burger with maple-candied apple wood bacon on a Brioche bun and the $6 quesadilla with pico de gallo and guacamole. Free delivery has led to a bustling take-out business since the restaurant is quite a distance from almost anywhere else in the prison, although there can be issues: When two gates malfunctioned, Rob Souza, a state assessor who also does deliveries, got stuck with brown bag lunches for delivery for an hour and a half.

Delancey Street in the prison opened in March 2015 with 90 handpicked prisoners. Plans for a restaurant were delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic.

The engine of all things Delancey Street is Mimi Silbert, the diminutive 82-year-old co-founder and chief executive with a Ph.D. in criminology from the University of California, Berkeley. She works with sentencing judges and people who have hit bottom. Candidates commit to two years of tough  commitments, learning how to live a crime-free, drug-free life.  They learn vocational, academic and social skills. “We get lots of gang members,” Silbert said,”  Delancey Street teaches them “how to rely on each other,” she said.

Part of that involves food. Silbert believes meals eaten together — the inmates built a long, dining room table where they eat together —  creates a sense of family. And Delancey Street members with kitchen training can enter “an industry that doesn’t discriminate,” Gomez, the manager said.

“The whole point of Delancey” and the prison honors unit “is to show that the people with the problems become their own solutions,” Silbert said. With no chef,  “It’s inmates teaching each other.”

Silbert had no desire to work in a prison ; Delancey Street teaches people how to live outside of prison. But her longtime friend, Jerry Brown, the former governor who calls her “a saint,” coaxed her to take it on.  Gavin Newsom, the current governor, is equally supportive.

Years ago, when Brown wanted to better understand prison gangs, he often dropped by Delancey Street’s San Francisco headquarters and for hours interviewed ex-gang members. Early in his SF mayoral career, when Newsom grappled with alcohol abuse, he visited Delancey Street three times a week, Silbert said. When he became governor, he visited the Delancey Street in the prison to speak to the prisoners.

“The human is crushed by excessive institutionalization,” Brown said in a phone interview from his ranch in rural Northern California.  “Mimi gives inmates their personhood,” he said.

Silbert agreed to the deal but insisted it would be on her terms.

When the warden recommended the best inmates for her program, Silbert objected. “I want the worst of the worst!” she recounted in her best you-better-not-ignore-me voice.

“We wanted guys that were violent and in that world, respected, but also had the skill set to survive,” Mejia said. “If we could turn them, then we could get guys to follow them,” he said.

The restaurant opened nearly a year ago. It grosses $7,500 a month, more than covering the $5,000 food cost. Inmates earn a dollar an hour, which goes to their victims or the victims’ families. Delancey Street pays Gomez’s salary. The state pays for Souza, the assessor, who said, “The goal is not so much monetary. The inmates are learning how to be better versions of themselves.”

Only at the Delancey Street Solano does prison food come from excellent local suppliers.  But nothing came easily.  Silbert said, “When we started, it took us eight months to get a blackboard to write the word of the day,” a Delancey Street practice.  For Thanksgiving it took eight months to get approval to serve turkey and roast beef, Silbert said. When she realized she had forgotten napkins, she said, “I called Jerry and said, ‘I need napkins.’”

Earlier this month, at the restaurant’s grand opening, inmates served meals to both Newsom and Brown.

The inmates in the Delancey Street Honors Program at the prison practice “each one, teach one,” becoming proficient in public speaking, debate and constructive criticism.  On a Tuesday in June, the word of the day, selected by a group of Delancey Street Solano members, was “quintessential.”

Silbert says the inmates have gone beyond normalization. “They have so many things going against them,” she said. And yet, “they’re doing things that are extraordinary. They’re forming unity out of a world that is not unified. And they’re becoming the absolute best of themselves.”

Financial support for this story was provided by the Smidt Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation.