San Quentin, California · 1942–1950
A warden asked for AA, members drove in from around the bay, and the first group in a prison proved itself one night in the prison hospital.
“Archie,” I said, “what’s wrong with San Quentin having an Alcoholics Anonymous chapter?”
San Quentin, California’s maximum-security prison on the bay north of San Francisco, held thousands of men. Clinton T. Duffy was born there in 1898, the son of a guard, and became its warden in 1940. In one of the prison’s surveys, he wrote, 68 percent of the men admitted, or their records showed, that liquor had played some part in their downfall.
He talked it over with Archie Lyons of the parole board. “Not a thing, Clint,” Lyons said. “If you want to start it, I’ll help you.” Duffy wrote to some of AA’s organizers in San Francisco, and they agreed to come. “No other prison had ever tried A.A. within the walls.” Some officials worried about bringing outsiders in to work with the men. The prison board, Bill W. heard Duffy say later, worried most about alcoholic women among them.
The group began in 1942. Duffy announced it in the San Quentin News, the prison paper, and over the Gray Network, the prison’s own radio, piped to headsets in the cells. Twenty men joined. Prisoners and keepers alike were skeptical, Bill wrote: “They thought AA must be a racket. Or maybe a crackpot religion.”
Then came a night in October; Duffy didn’t say which year. A group of men drank the fluid from the prison’s duplicating machines, a mix of grain and wood alcohol. Two went blind and died within hours. Duffy went on the prison radio, told the others who had drunk it to report to the hospital, and promised no punishment. AA members who heard him volunteered. With nineteen of them helping, the doctors worked through the night with glucose, oxygen and transfusions, and the AA men gave blood and went without meals. Two more men died two days later. Ten lived.
“AA hadn’t been any too popular,” Bill wrote, “but now prison morale hit an all-time high and stayed there.” Many of the survivors joined. In November 1943, Bill spoke inside to about 420 inmates. Lois W. was not allowed in.
By 1950, Duffy wrote, the group had averaged two hundred members for seven years, with as many as a hundred visitors on a Sunday from towns around the bay, and more than fifty other prisons and institutions in the United States, Canada and Australia had “adopted the San Quentin plan.” That July he traveled 2,000 miles to tell the story at AA’s convention in Cleveland.
It’s 1942, at San Quentin, the state prison on the bay north of San Francisco. The warden, Clinton Duffy, was born there, the son of a guard. By his count, liquor helped put two men in three behind those walls. So he asks a member of the parole board: what’s wrong with an AA group inside? Nothing, the man says.
Duffy writes to the AA members in San Francisco, and they come. No prison has ever let AA in. Twenty inmates join.
Then, one October night, a group of men drink the fluid from the prison’s duplicating machines. The warden goes on the prison radio and begs them to report to the hospital. The AA members turn out too, and give their blood. Four men die. Ten live. After that night, AA is at San Quentin to stay.
One card per telling
The first AA group in a prison has four tellings, and each gives the start to someone different: the warden, the members outside, a man from Los Angeles and an inmate, a released prisoner.
Four labels, in the order each was set down. His own book: the warden’s, 1950. AA’s books: Bill W.’s history, 1957, and a note added to its later printings. A memoir: Lois W.’s, published by Al-Anon in 1979.
His own book
AA’s books
AA’s books
A memoir
It took all of them
The warden opened the gate, members drove in from outside, and men inside kept it going. Duffy himself said it would have failed without either side.
For a closer look
How the night in the hospital was told, two ways; what the parole figures said; and how few guards there were.
Duffy’s book tells it from his office and the hospital: men found in agony shortly before 4 a.m. one October morning, fourteen in all, the fluid from the duplicating machines, two dead before he went on the air, two more two days later, ten saved, and nineteen AA men helping.
In Cleveland in July 1950, before Duffy spoke, the convention heard a recording, soon to go out on the radio, that dramatized the night. In Bill’s account of it, a prisoner found “a promising fluid” in the prison paint shop and shared it, and “several of them died.” The San Quentin AA group volunteered at once, and only quick blood transfusions could save those still living.
The two agree on the night and the blood. They differ on where the fluid came from, and on the count.
Before AA, Bill wrote, about 80 percent of paroled alcoholic prisoners ended up back in prison. Both of his accounts give that figure.
After: in 1950, reporting Duffy’s talk, he wrote that many institutions saw the rate fall to “one-half, even one-third of what it used to be.” In 1957, telling San Quentin’s story, he wrote that the figures dropped to “a spectacular 20 per cent,” and counted more than 300 prison groups by then.
Duffy’s own book gives no figure. “I believe,” he wrote, that AA men on parole “have a consistently better record” than other parolees.
The meetings ran with almost no watching. In 1950, as Bill reported him, Duffy said that hundreds of prisoners had come to hundreds of meetings and not one prison rule had been broken. “Hardly needed is that solitary, sympathetic guard who sits in the back row.”
Bill’s history of 1957 puts the guard outside the door instead: “The meetings had only one guard, stationed outside the meeting room,” there mainly to look after the visitors. Some prisoners who weren’t alcoholics, it adds, wanted to join anyway.
The picture at the top of this page follows the 1950 telling.