Adam Jones spent more than four years as a Seattle police officer and over 11 serving the Washington State National Guard — hardly a predictable résumé for someone who recently tutored for several months at California’s oldest prison.
While interning at the San Francisco Public Defender’s Office last summer, his supervising attorney shared that he had volunteered at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center as a writing tutor for students pursuing an Associate of Arts degree.
Jones, a former language instructor in the military and passionate about teaching, saw a natural fit. On Sunday afternoons last semester, he helped San Quentin students develop ideas, hone their skills, and reach their degree requirements. Working with students from English courses and any course with writing assignments, he tutored in one-on-one and small-group settings.
Now a rising 3L who transferred to Berkeley Law last year from UC Law San Francisco, Jones is pursuing a career in public defense. He recently completed a semester-long externship with a federal district court judge in Oakland and is working this summer at UnCommon Law, which helps people navigate California’s discretionary parole process.
Below, Jones describes tutoring at San Quentin and how his past police work impacted his experience.
Approaching the old education center, I would see the living quarters on one side and the yard on the other. Students were wearing backpacks as they headed to class, passing folks jogging around the track. Friends chatted as they walked by, the ordinary texture of people moving through their day.
That’s what greeted me when I showed up to volunteer at San Quentin.
Once inside, students would come over looking for help with assigned papers. We gathered around a table and got to work.
One student wrote about training dogs and the parallels he saw in the way society treats incarcerated people. Another wrote about losing his job after misusing a printer at work, a small mistake that became the first step toward his incarceration at San Quentin. We didn’t dig into revision because there was nothing to fix. Instead, we talked about poets he admired, song lyrics that inspired him, and the writers he wanted to emulate.
When I first signed up to tutor at San Quentin, I was not consciously thinking about my years in policing, but of course they were part of it. I became a police officer in Seattle believing the system could be improved from within.
Working in that role, however, made it impossible to ignore how routinely individuals were reduced to charges, files, and procedures. I wanted to do more than move people through a process I had come to distrust. I came to law school to pursue public defense and the kind of advocacy I had once hoped policing could provide.
Throughout the semester, my professors emphasized the seriousness of legal decision-making, while the attorneys and judges I observed during my judicial externship demonstrated what that responsibility looks like in practice. Watching them work through difficult cases with diligence and care underscored how deeply those decisions affect the people involved.
What came through in conversations with the students at San Quentin was a strong desire not to be reduced to the worst thing they had ever done.
Our conversations rarely stayed confined to the writing assignments. We talked about books, music, family, regret, and their ideas for improving conditions for incarcerated people. That openness was also present in their writing.
While in chambers, I often thought about those conversations and about how much of a person’s life exists outside the formal record. Working in both spaces at once reinforced my belief that effective advocacy requires not only technical precision, but also the ability to see clients as more than the facts that brought them into the legal system.
Almost five years after leaving policing, I now walk through prison gates as a second-year law student. My time at San Quentin has reinforced the kind of lawyer I hope to become. It has taught me that advocacy begins with listening carefully, understanding context, and recognizing the dignity of people navigating systems built to judge them.