An Archive of Images from San Quentin State Prison | The New Yorker

There are giant frescoed murals in a dining hall at San Quentin State Prison, scenes of California history populated by figures whose eyes move with you as you walk past them. I saw them tracking me when I was once in that room, so I know that the rumor about the eyes is more than a myth. The murals were started in 1953 by an artist named Alfredo Santos, who would serve four years of a sentence at San Quentin. As I stood in that dining hall, listening to the lore about the murals from men who take their meals below the painted faces, I looked up at a sign on one end of the long room that announced “no warning shots in this area.”