Kevin McCarthy, who spent nine years and four months in solitary confinement, is a new member of the Berkeley student body this fall. “In order to see this day,” he said, “I had to force myself to remain positive during some very frustrating and discouraging times.” (UC Berkeley photo by Irene Yi)
A photo of himself under iconic Sather Gate. That was Kevin McCarthy’s frequent daydream, after being admitted to UC Berkeley. But he had a recurring nightmare, too, that he’d never get to enroll. He feared it was an omen; in his sleep, a voice once whispered, “You will not be at Berkeley for a very long time.” This fall, McCarthy, 39, finally has his photo, and his freedom, having been incarcerated 22 years — including nine years and four months straight in solitary confinement. Released July 24 from Pleasant Valley State Prison in Fresno County, he couldn’t wait to step foot on the Berkeley campus, “sacred ground,” he calls it, having been in a living hell. “I just had to get here, to overcome the naysayers, the senseless policies that held me back, the prison guards who retaliated against me, and the nightmares,” said McCarthy. “I feel a sense of absolute joy to be here.” He doesn’t mind that fall instruction is remote, during the coronavirus pandemic: In a studio apartment one block from Berkeley, he’s busy with online classes, a work-study job and plans for a legal studies degree, then law school. McCarthy applied to Berkeley in 2016, was admitted in 2017, but had to defer three times. In 2016, Californians passed Proposition 57, designed to give people like McCarthy — classified as having serious, but nonviolent, convictions — a chance at early parole. Yet, McCarthy repeatedly was kept behind bars, despite serving more than the base term for his crime, earning two associate degrees and recruiting a college instructor and 30 students to launch in-person courses at Pleasant Valley. He’s got a few theories about why. Among them, he said, were his efforts in prison to overhaul the use of indefinite solitary confinement by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) by participating in massive hunger strikes in 2011 and 2013 and in the related class action lawsuit, Ashker v. Brown, which won a landmark settlement in 2015. He also filed a writ of habeas corpus in 2018 and will attend an evidentiary hearing later this month to try and stop “gladiator fights” — staged brawls that, for years, incarcerated individuals have accused guards of orchestrating to pit rival prison gang members against each other. McCarthy’s law studies in prison also led him to become a jailhouse lawyer who informally helped other people behind bars with legal matters related to their sentences.