Breakout is a selection of short comics from incarcerated artists of different ages, backgrounds, and abilities who meet weekly to focus on individual projects and to collaborate with and support each other. The San Quentin Graphic Novel Collective was developed in the San Quentin Arts in Correction program, which supports classes in the visual arts, writing, and music. Breakout is dedicated to the late Rene Garcia, a gifted San Francisco artist and innovative and supportive teacher who was dearly loved, including by his incarcerated students. He had just started teaching graphic novels to the class when he died suddenly at the age of 41.

Artist Sonia Wallach took over the nascent graphic novel project and supported each artist to best tell his own story. The book contains humor and sadness, as shown in traditional comic heroes, villains from multiple cultures, a trip around the world to visit famous artworks, depictions of childhood trauma and abandonment and life in prison, and in the imagined freedom after leaving prison.

San Quentin Arts in Corrections is supported by the William James Association through the Arts in Corrections program of the California Arts Council and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.