San Quentin Rehabilitation Center Learning Campus

The building McCarthy started with was a decommissioned prison-industries warehouse. What opened on February 20, 2026 is an 81,000-square-foot campus of three connected buildings with eleven classrooms, vocational shops, a media center and a courtyard — the physical form of what California has been calling the California Model, a reorientation of San Quentin from punishment toward Scandinavian-style rehabilitation.

Delivery is the story for anyone in the trade. This was a progressive design-build job with an 18-month construction window, executed entirely inside an operating maximum-security facility. Every material delivery, every subcontractor crew and every tool count ran through prison security protocol. It finished on time and on budget.

Project Scope

Adaptive reuse of an existing warehouse into three interconnected buildings totaling 81,000 square feet: classrooms, hands-on vocational shops, a media production center and a campus-style courtyard. DLR Group led design with Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects; Vanir Construction Management handled program and construction management; Del Monte Electric carried the electrical. Cost was revised down from an initial $360 million estimate in the 2023 state budget to $239 million by December 2023 — a rare direction of travel for a California capital project.

Why It Matters

Building a school inside a prison is a logistics problem before it’s an architecture problem, and the 18-month schedule is the number worth quoting. Progressive design-build let CDCR and McCarthy price the work as the security constraints became clear rather than guessing at them in a lump-sum bid, which is most of why the budget came down instead of up. If other states follow California here — and several are watching — this is the delivery model they’ll be copying.

Project Team & Details