Kevin Walsh thought he would never leave prison, much less remove his swastika tattoo.. His is a tale of redemption through some of California’s most notorious maximum-security prisons.

Security fences around a California state prison. Michael Macor for The Chronicle

Kevin Walsh was 29 years old when he had a swastika tattooed across his left cheekbone. And it wasn’t his first. It was a fellow inmate at California Correctional Institution with a homemade tattoo-gun and smuggled ink that branded his skin for him. It was 2013. He had spent practically all his adult life imprisoned and at that precise moment, Walsh never thought he would ever leave the maximum-security prison.

As a kid growing up in Southern California, Walsh would look after his two younger sisters, while they were shuffled around from one relative’s home to the next. His mother grew absent after their parents divorced, and his father dedicated more time to his biker gang than he did to his children. When he did spend time with them, it often came with drunken bursts of violence.

Walsh grew accustomed to being stopped by the police for running around the sewers of Costa Mesa with other kids. Just like his father, his friends’ parents were members of gangs and sometimes incarcerated. By 16, Walsh was homeless. He spent his time getting high and drinking while listening to music with his friends.

At the age of 21, while Walsh was imprisoned for six months on a trespassing charge, he began a twelve-step program to stop consuming drugs and alcohol. In this program he befriended other men who, despite being sober, continued criminal activity in gangs.

“The program didn’t teach me how to cope with my anger. It’s around this time that I stopped praying and things started getting bad. I wanted to take it out on God.”

He relapsed on drugs and surrendered himself to his gang.

“I couldn’t stay out after that.”

For the next few years, each time he was sent to prison, his status within his gang increased as he went up in its ranks.

In 2008, during his first week of parole from Soledad Prison, Walsh would spend time at a bar, which was a local hangout for his gang. One day a guy that Walsh knew from the twelve-step program came up to him and said he’d like to join their organization. “He was a good guy and he wanted to be part of our circle, but he was dating someone that wasn’t his race.” Walsh told him that although he personally didn’t mind that he dated this girl, the gang would never allow it. Walsh advised him to forget about joining, but the man insisted.

“My body was out of prison, but my heart was still locked up. I had used drugs the night before. I was coming down from that and I had no money. I told the guy to come to the bar. I had the intention of jumping him and taking his money and I invited a friend.”

Walsh didn’t understand why his friend had invited someone else as well. He also didn’t know that they had brought box cutters with them. When they began slashing the man’s head and face, Walsh froze and then ran away. “Thankfully, someone turned me in. Whoever turned me in, saved my life or somebody else’s life, because I had so much anger inside of me.”

When police pressured Walsh to reveal the names of the other two men who had slashed the victim, he wouldn’t. He wanted to protect them and he felt responsible for what had happened. As a result, after just one week on parole, Walsh was charged with 17 felonies, including mayhem, armed robbery, a civil rights violation, street terrorism, gang enhancements. He faced at least 80 years in prison.

To help pay for an attorney, his father sold a motorcycle that he was building for Walsh. His mother helped pay for a private investigator. In the end, Walsh and a codefendant agreed to a deal to do ten years in prison each. Walsh was laughing in the courtroom as he signed the deal, relieved that it wasn’t a life term. However, when he looked over to his family, he saw that they were crying and realized the gravitas of the situation.

Walsh was immediately sent to Pelican Bay Prison, where the very next day an inmate killed another prisoner. From there, he was transferred to Salinas Valley Prison where he learned how to make whiskey. First, he collected apples, then he melted the plastic lid of a coffee jar to make a grater with which he shredded the apples. He’d then let the pulp ferment in a plastic bag to which he would add any sugar he could find, such as jelly and syrup. He would sell one 16-ounce tumbler of whiskey for $25.

It was also in Salinas Valley where he allowed another gang member to tattoo a swastika onto his face. He wore the tattoo more as an armor and an act of fidelity towards his gang, than as a sign of hate. Although, he understood the symbology. “I’m not dumb. I didn’t live under a rock. I’m aware of the Holocaust, but growing up here is different than New York. I’ve never met anybody that was a survivor of that. I wouldn’t say I didn’t care, because I do care. I just didn’t understand the offence it could cause.”

With the swastika tattoo, Walsh had given himself up integrally, in body and spirit, to his gang, whose name he rather not disclose. The tattoo was his cry to the world that he had fully assumed his criminal identity.

“I just wanted to be left alone. It was a ´hey stay away from me´,” he says. “I love my people, so if you’re gonna hurt us, I’m gonna hurt you. You know what I mean? It was a self-protecting thing. It was also impulsive. I didn’t think full-on what it was. Also, I never thought I was gonna come home. There was that part of it as well.”

As Walsh ascended the ranks in his gang, so did the number of threats he received from other inmates challenging his authority. A few months later, prison guards caught him with a weapon that he carried to protect himself.

In July of that same year, 2013, when an inmate had been disrespectful to some of the gang leaders, Walsh was assigned with the task of defending their honor. He teamed up with another prisoner who was incarcerated for life and therefore had nothing to lose. “I’m not the one who actually cut the guy’s throat, but I was a part of it.” The inmate survived and Walsh was charged with attempted murder.

This led him to be sentenced to solitary confinement in the Security Housing Units, known by prisoners as the SHU. This severe form of prisoner isolation is reserved for the most dangerous criminals and gangs’ highest-ranking leaders. Walsh was sentenced to four years in the SHU, which he refers to as the “prison within the prison”. He describes it as a cauldron of angry people with an undercurrent of evilness.

Just one week before Walsh was sentenced to the Security Housing Unit, close to 30,000 inmates across California prisons began a hunger strike to protest the extreme conditions of the SHU. Some critics say that this extreme isolation only exacerbates mental illnesses and encourages suicides, which is the leading cause of death in American jails. Prison officials argue that it is the only way they can reduce inmate-on-inmate violence.

The cells in the SHU measure six by eight feet. Prisoners are confined to them for 23 hours a day. They are allowed one hour in the recreation pen. Each prison has a different kind of “rec” pen. The luxurious version can be described as a caged outdoor box. The standard “rec” pen is a room with a skylight through which the sunlight sneaks in.

According to reporter Paige St. John who visited the SHU at Pelican Bay in 2013, the same year Walsh was there, “Kept indoors for years, men in the SHU take on a ghostly pallor, as if dusted with flour.”

During the 14 years Walsh spent behind bars, he was transferred between eight different prisons, but he spent most time in the California Correctional Institution.

This maximum-security prison sprawls over 1,650 acres and was built in a valley surrounded by mountains, as if this natural buffer might add an extra layer of dissuasion for prisoners considering an escape. It is located in Tehachapi, southern California, 20 miles west of the Mojave Desert and 115 miles north of Los Angeles. A bird’s eye view shows one main, rectangular area and three smaller satellite units, of which one is hexagon-shaped and the remaining two oval-shaped. Just past these three units rise the grandiose Tehachapi Mountains in the distance. In the language of the local Kawaiisu Native American tribe, Tehachapi means “hard climb” and this is exactly what Walsh began doing during his isolation in the SHU.

After having completed his four years, Walsh was getting ready to be released from the SHU in 2017. It had been several years since he had last seen his family, as visits were strictly forbidden in this segregation unit. He told his family how he was looking forward to hugging them soon.

Walsh recalls the prison administration’s reversal, “They were like, ´No! You’re not going out to the yard ever again. You’re going to stay in the SHU the rest of your time.”

The prison administration kept him longer in complete isolation because they knew he was still very much a part of his gang. They offered him a choice: either renounce the gang and enroll in a series of self-help programs or continue in maximum isolation without a chance to ever see his family again.

It took Walsh nine months of heavy reflection on his situation and what he wanted for his life, before he was able to reach what he refers to as “surrender”.

“I didn’t want to continue to put my family through this. I just wanted to be able to hug my mom again. Also, I had been trying to sign up for college but wasn’t allowed to while I remained in the SHU.”

He realized that if he continued entrenched in gang culture, there would always be another inmate who would try to make a name for himself by challenging Walsh or holding a grudge against him. He would be trapped in this violence. He was 35 and growing tired of these prison politics.

“I began to see how everyone who was in charge were just a bunch of drug addicts and angry people like me. I had gotten so high up in it, that I could see right through all the bullshit and I thought it was ridiculous. I had to decide. Am I going to choose prison for the rest of my life and either die of old age and have my family pay for my funeral, or get killed and have my family pay for a funeral?”

It all boiled down to one day, when Walsh knew he was finally ready to quit his gang. For the past four years he had carried, inside his mouth, a small piece paper wrapped in plastic that contained very important information for the organization. That morning he pulled it out of his mouth, opened it and flushed it down the toilet.

Later that day, Walsh was seated and handcuffed in a bare prison room, surrounded by a committee of 12 prison officers and administrators discussing his case, when Walsh told them, “You know what? I’m done”. The committee asked him to repeat himself to which he answered, “I´m not going to repeat myself. You heard it.” His pride kept him from repeating his decision to leave the gang.

“It was like removing a bandage from a wound and exposing it to the air so that it could heal. It was crazy, because for the first time I really believed that maybe I had a future. Maybe I can come home.”

The concrete prison walls were nothing compared to the rigid structures Walsh had built in his mind. He had belonged to a gang his entire adult life. That was his identity. That was where he found his self-worth. His fear of leaving behind this criminal version of himself, the only one he knew, was heavier than any shackles he might have worn at the SHU.

Yet removing himself from his gang did not automatically change him. Walsh realized he still had the same criminal mentality. “That was 2017. I had to go through so much stuff in the subsequent years.”. One lesson was to no longer need the validation from those who challenged him. He learned to walk away from a fight.

A former cellmate that had been released left him his television as a gift, which quickly became coveted by another prisoner. One day he showed up drunk at Walsh’s cell door and began threatening that he would kill him to get his television. Walsh’s new cellmate was a younger man who offered to stab the prisoner to make him stop threatening Walsh.

“At this point I had understood that I was going to have to experience some level of shame if I ever wanted to leave prison.” Walsh opened the door and told the raging prisoner, “You can have it. Please take the TV. It’s not worth the rest of my life and one day you’re going to understand that.”

Still, Walsh’s inner critic had not come to terms with this new behavior. He had to contend with second thoughts on what he had just done and the resentment he was still feeling for the man to whom he had given his television. It was only when another longtime prison mate told him how proud he was for showing others that it was possible to do things differently, that he understood he had taken an important step to healing his anger.

“Having my brothers there to remind me that I made the right decision, helped me just as much as the self-help groups we were in. I knew it was right thing to do, but it still hurt you know? A few years ago, I would have risked my entire life for that.”

Walsh’s projected exit date from prison ranged from a minimum of 2025 to a maximum of 2027. How soon he would be released depended on his behavior.

He is convinced that his transformation became possible when he decided to stop consuming drugs and alcohol. He believes it is the main reason why he was able to change and so many other inmates do not.

“I started breaking off learned behaviors. Simple things. If you call me a certain name, I’m not gonna respond. Simple things. Little milestones like trying to get off a certain custody level. First, I´m gonna try to get this job. Then, I´m gonna try to make it to this spot.”

Walsh went beyond merely staying out of any gangs. “I remember how graceful other men had been with me and I was able to share that with others.” When he left the isolation of the SHU and had to come face to face with inmates whom he had trouble with in the past, Walsh would proactively apologize and offer to make amends. He was purposefully trying to put into practice what he was learning in the self-help groups. He was surprised by how the majority accepted the olive branch he handed them.

At first, he had signed up for self-help groups only because it was a way to reduce his remaining time. But soon, he was even asked to help facilitate some of them.

“Once that weight of having to respond to things because ´these guys are watching me for weakness´ is eliminated, you can be more graceful and say ´it’s all good´”.

Walsh was showing gradual, but clear progress. In 2018 he began to focus on requesting a board review in which his case could be reviewed by the Pelican Bay Captain, the associate warden and gang unit officers, to possibly move up his release date from prison.

“My record was so bad, that I knew I needed to prepare for this board review as if I was a ´lifer´. I needed to present myself in the best light possible. But in the process, something changed. I stopped doing it for them and I started doing it for myself. So, I really started applying this stuff, internalizing these tools, reevaluating these things and teaching my peers.”

Two years later in August 2020, prison officials offered him a board date. It was denied and his release date for 2025–2027 did not budge. But Walsh focused on how his good behavior had been rewarded with a board review.

It was during this time that Walsh, while was watching the news in prison, first learned about cancel culture. He began wondering how he would be able to get a job and be accepted by society with a big swastika on his face.

The definitive push came from a question he was asked in 2019 when he was being interviewed for a documentary filmed inside the prison by French artist JR and his team. As Walsh began describing himself as a really loving person, the person interviewing him -who was Jewish- asked, “How can you say you are loving with this symbol of hate on your face?” Walsh tried defending himself by explaining that it was a gang thing, but at that moment he understood the swastika tattoo could offend others. He felt ashamed.

When Walsh was released from prison in November 2021, much sooner than his projected date, he immediately covered his tattoo with a band aid.

While still on parole, in February 2022, Walsh took his new sense of grace to face one of his biggest fears. He texted his father, “I forgive you”. To which his father immediately called back and yelled, “Why are you mad at me? What did I do?” Walsh managed to control his anger at his father’s response and just repeated that he forgave him.

The same week he was released from prison, Walsh began his tattoo removal at Homeboy Industries, a gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in Los Angeles. It was here that he met his future boss at Project Kinship, a nonprofit that provides reentry services for people impacted by incarceration, gangs or violence.

When Homeboy Industries temporarily closed during the pandemic, Walsh had to wait to finish removing the swastika on his cheek. He continued covering it with a band aid whenever he went out. A friend agreed to help him pay to finish removing it with Dr. John Nelson at the David Beckman Laser Institute where he would go every six weeks. Soon, he will have his twelfth and last session.

Once his parole terminated in November 2022, the documentary film crew invited him to visit New York and attend Time Magazine’s Person of the Year Award gala. The prize was given to Urkranian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. But more importantly for Walsh, he had the chance to meet a rabbi who was a friend of the documentary film producer and knew of Walsh’s story.

The Jewish leader asked, “What is it like to meet a rabbi?”

To which Walsh answered, “It’s like meeting any other child of God.”

The two men exchanged more words and agreed that Walsh would visit his synagogue to speak with the community and students there.

They parted with a hug.

Today, in addition to working at Project Kinship, Walsh is pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Human Services with an Addiction Studies Concentration at California State University Fullerton. After he graduates, he plans to pursue a master’s degree in social work.