San Quentin Warden Views Grim Duty With Equanimity

Like many lifers who pass through one of California’s most notorious prisons, Dan Vasquez grew up tough in a poor Southern California neighborhood, joined a gang and dropped out of high school.

But the stocky, rough-talking Vasquez is not behind the bars of San Quentin. He is in charge. And as the prison’s warden, he is preparing to direct the scheduled execution Tuesday of Robert Alton Harris, which would be the first in California since 1967.

“I’m not a ghoulish person. I’m not relishing that upcoming, potentially upcoming, execution,” Vasquez said. “But I know what my job is. I know I have to carry out the responsibilities of my job.”

Vasquez’s views on crime and justice were honed in the Redlands barrio where he grew up, as well as in the state correctional system, where he started his career a quarter-century ago as a guard at the prison in Chino.

A likeness of San Quentin is forged on his belt buckle. On the back of his hand are his initials, tattooed in the ragged style of the streets. He keeps it as “a reminder of the old days.”

“Some people make decisions in life that they can never, never change again,” said Vasquez, 46. “Fortunately, I hadn’t made that type.”

When he discusses the death penalty, his words are not the slick slogans of a politician, or the fine and silvery arguments of an attorney. He is at the “business end” of the ultimate sanction a state can impose.

Under the procedure he revised when he arrived as warden in 1984, Vasquez must order that his officers place the prisoner in the gas chamber. Then he will signal one of them to lower the lever immersing cyanide pellets in acid, thus forming deadly gas.

“I don’t have any personal or moral conflict over it. I don’t. I’m fortunate,” he said. Then, as if anticipating that some death penalty abolitionist might call his attitude shallow or callous, he said, “I think I’m just as much a deep thinker as the next person.”

Each day, Vasquez drives past protesters who have been keeping a vigil outside San Quentin since Harris’ execution date was set two months ago. The warden wonders about their priorities.

Referring to the murders for which Harris was sentenced to death, Vasquez said, “How quickly they forgot the crime that was committed against two young people, two 16-year-old kids.”

Vasquez knows that if he didn’t have a bit of luck, concerned parents and occasional help from a teacher or probation officer, he might have ended up a San Quentin inmate. As a teen-age gang member, he “was getting into a lot of trouble,” he said.

The Army was his way out. In the service, he received a high school diploma. The Army trained him to become a police officer. Upon his discharge in the mid-1960s, he tried to join police departments in Southern California. But at just under 5-foot-8, he failed to meet the restrictive minimum height requirements then in place for the departments. He was, however, accepted as a correctional officer at Chino.

As he worked his way up, he went to college, became a parole officer, and returned to the prisons as an agent investigating prison gangs. In the late 1970s, he became an administrator, rising to deputy superintendent at Soledad state prison.

Then the call came to run San Quentin. In corrections, the job of warden at San Quentin “is prestigious,” said James Park, San Quentin associate warden from 1964 to 1972 and now a consultant to the joint legislative committee on prison construction. “It is still the prison in California.”

The prison Vasquez took over was in sad shape. Stabbings were common. With 1,750 prisoners in maximum custody, San Quentin had more high-security inmates than any prison in the country. State and federal judges had deemed conditions unconstitutional.

In the 1980s, under court oversight that continues, the state spent $35 million to renovate the prison and moved high-security prisoners to newer institutions. Still, violence flares. Even as Vasquez spoke to The Times recently, officers were investigating a homicide.

Vasquez has not gotten to know the man most likely to die next in the gas chamber. He has no desire to do so. He did, however, take it upon himself to tell Harris when the inmate’s execution date was set in February. He tried to get Harris to think about final details, such as how his belongings should be disposed of, and what should be done with his body.

“He was understandably shaken,” Vasquez said. “The warden was there with a death warrant.”

Vasquez has thought hard about the mechanics of a state killing. He has tested the gas chamber and has visited Southern states to see how they carry out executions.

But he does not see himself as an executioner. “If you want to talk about an executioner,” he said, “you better make arrangements to talk to Robert Alton Harris because he is a self-appointed executioner. I am not and none of my staff is.”