San Quentin SkunkWorks is an incarcerated-led nonprofit innovation lab redefining what prison reform looks like in America.

San Quentin SkunkWorks began as a conversation between Kyle Winchell and Kai Bannon on the yard at San Quentin. Kyle went home in 2022 and now runs the outside half of the organization as Executive Director: compliance, fundraising, and everything that needs a signature or a key card. Kai runs the inside half, leading the Impact Team that designs and delivers every program. That split is the design. The people who live the problem lead the work, and the people outside clear the way. Lasting change in the justice system comes from the inside out.

SkunkWorks is not the first. Incarcerated people have built and led their own organizations for more than half a century: the Lifers’ Group at MCI-Norfolk in Massachusetts, the Black Prisoners’ Caucus in Washington’s prisons since 1972. We work in that tradition.

Prison reform is almost always designed from the outside looking in. Wardens, policymakers, and advocates decide what change should look like, while the people living inside are treated as subjects of that change, not partners in designing it. Programs built this way keep failing for the same reason: they solve the problem their designers imagined instead of the one that exists.

The reverse failure is just as real, and less discussed. When incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people do lead, the field rarely gives them what it gives everyone else: research partnerships, data infrastructure, sustained funding, collaborators at the top of their fields. Lived experience gets treated as a story to feature rather than expertise to fund. So many of the programs closest to the problem stay small, undocumented, and easy to dismiss.

San Quentin SkunkWorks exists to close the gap from both sides. We are an actual skunkworks: a small team inside the institution with real design authority, backed by the rigor and talent of a serious research lab. We live inside this system, and we lead the work of changing it.

Design authority stays inside. Every SkunkWorks program is designed and run by us, the Impact Team, incarcerated residents at San Quentin. The outside team handles the money, manages compliance, and clears the path, but it does not decide what gets built. And we answer for the work in a way no one else can: whatever we build, we live inside by lights-out.

Most rehabilitation programs try to change individuals, one at a time. Our thesis is that environments change people faster than programs do: change what a space looks like, how people gather in it, and which rules govern it, and you change everyone who passes through, staff included. A 33,000-square-foot mural that changes both its environment and its painters, a game night that desegregates a building, and an incarcerated led bill in Sacramento are all tests of the same hypothesis.

We hold the work to field standards. Community-led does not have to mean under-built. We log our own participation numbers, co-design research with UC Irvine’s Games + Learning + Society Center, publish through peer review, and recruit collaborators at the top of their fields to work inside, on the work’s terms.

We build for every prison, not just this one. A fix that never leaves San Quentin is a good deed, not reform. The lab is documented so that in time inside teams at other prisons can run the model on their own terms, and what we learn moves upstream into law and policy changes.