Jeanne Woodford’s mother wanted her to look outside the parameters of typical women’s work for a career. But she probably never expected her daughter to be the first woman warden in San Quentin’s 148-year history.
“She had wanted to go into medicine when she was young,” Jeanne Woodford said of her mother. “But she had been discouraged. Because of that, she was very encouraging that I do something non-traditional. So that’s what I set out to do.”
“And corrections has definitely been interesting,” she said.
At 46, she’s spent nearly half her life at San Quentin, working her way to a job her 7-year-old son thinks of as “neat,” but which most would consider daunting at best.
She’s in charge of 1,400 employees and nearly 6,000 prisoners, but at the end of the day she’s a mother of five, dashing to Little League games and trying to find time to work in the garden.
It’s hardly unusual for women to be prison wardens — they head 10 of California’s 33 state prisons — but until Woodford’s appointment by Gov. Gray Davis two weeks ago, San Quentin had always had a male warden. Only a handful of women worked there when Woodford arrived in 1978, a criminal justice major fresh out of Sonoma State taking her first job as a correctional officer.
“I was excited and probably a little scared at the same time,” she said, sitting in her wood- paneled office overlooking San Francisco Bay. Fans whirred overhead, a reminder that most of San Quentin has been around far too long to have air-conditioning. “I can’t tell you that there weren’t days when I wondered what I was doing here.”
Apparently, many of the men she worked with wondered the same thing.
“Some were very kind,” Woodford said. “And some were very adamant that they didn’t want women there. Sometimes they didn’t talk to you at all.”
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She never expected to stay at the prison, she said, but opportunities for better jobs within the system kept coming up. It helped that she was a college graduate and it couldn’t have hurt that she seems virtually unflappable. Until about 1988, San Quentin was filled with extremely violent, “Level 4” inmates and the staff was so small that two staff people guarded 500 of the most dangerous prisoners.
“You had to really be on your toes,” Woodford said. “Your word had to be your word. You had to be firm but respectful.”
Dealing directly with inmates never intimidated her, she said. They called her names, but she ignored them.She was attacked once by a prisoner who punched her as she was locking a gate.
“It was a tense moment,” she said. “But I saw by the look on his face that he was shocked he’d done that. He threw that punch and ran. It didn’t scare me.”
San Quentin’s mission has changed over the years, with the Level 4 inmates being relocated to other higher-security facilities in the late 1980s.
But it is the Death Row inmates who give San Quentin its reputation. The state penal code requires them to be sent to San Quentin. It held 553 of them this week, and about 30 more arrive each year. Woodford refers to them as the “the condemned.”
Her tone neutralizes and gets a little quieter when she talks about them.
As acting warden for the past 15 months and before that as chief deputy warden, Woodford has dealt with the pressures that come with executions, having given the orders for two men to be put to death.
All in all, though, Woodford seems capable of letting general criticisms about the prison roll off her back.
“Running a prison is a really tough job,” she said. “Bad things happen here, just like in a city. People are much more critical when it happens inside our city than when it happens in Vallejo or Benicia.”