Donald DeNevi was born in Stockton, California, where his father ran a hardware store.
Seeing the Stanley Kramer film “My Six Convicts” at the age of 14 incited a life-long
fascination with the psychology of imprisonment and the viability of rehabilitation. In the
late 1950s, he interned as a teacher at a prison near Stockton before graduating from San
Francisco State University with a B.A. in History. He continued his education at U.C.
Berkeley, from which he received his Ph. D in the early 1970s, and has since taught
classes such as Criminal Profiling, Organized Crime in America, Classic Crime Cinema
and Understanding the Criminal Mind at multiple colleges throughout the Bay Area. The
author of 36 books to date, DeNevi was named Director of Recreation at San Quentin
Prison in 2001, where he established a tennis program for lifers and three-strikers with
prolonged sentences.
