California announces plan to close more prisons, including its last private facility

The division additionally stated it might start steps to shut Chuckawalla Valley State Jail in Blythe (Riverside County) by March 2025. The medium-security male facility holds 2,039 inmates, 17.3% above its designed capability. As well as, the division stated, throughout 2023 it plans to shut the ladies’s part of Folsom State Jail in Sacramento County and elements of the prisons at Pelican Bay (Del Norte County), the California Males’s Colony in San Luis Obispo, the California Rehabilitation Heart in Norco (Riverside County), the California Establishment for Males in Chino (San Bernardino County), and the California Correctional Establishment in Tehachapi (Kern County). Their inmates can be transferred to different prisons after the closures.

The division stated it might “work to restrict the influence to staff,” permitting them to switch to different prisons. It stated it might work with neighborhood members in Riverside County “to assist help staff and foster a bottom-up financial resilience plan” to ease the influence of closing the Chuckwalla Valley jail.

That was additionally the plan introduced by the division final 12 months for the closure of one other rural jail, the California Correctional Heart in Susanville (Lassen County). Gov. Gavin Newsom had deliberate to close the jail by this June, however Susanville officers sued, arguing that they’d been wrongly neglected of the method of deciding which prisons to keep up. A choose issued an injunction blocking the closure, however one other choose lifted the injunction in September, saying state legislation left these selections as much as the Legislature and jail officers. The jail is now scheduled to shut subsequent June.

Newsom closed one other jail, Deuel Vocational Establishment in Tracy (San Joaquin County), in September 2021. The state nonetheless has 34 prisons.

Tuesday’s announcement was praised by Californians United for a Accountable Price range, an advocacy group that has referred to as for closures of 10 prisons.

“Our neighborhood applauds this transfer towards reversing California’s horrible historical past of jail enlargement,” stated the group’s government director, Amber Rose-Howard. “We hope yard deactivations are executed safely, and that they’re a sign of the long run jail closures everyone knows are potential over the subsequent a number of years.”

One other advocate of decreased imprisonment, Tinisch Hollins, government director of Californians for Security and Justice, stated the closures are welcome in a state that also spends greater than $14 billion a 12 months on its jail system.

“Analysis backs up many years of lived expertise that over-reliance on incarceration solely compounds the situations that create violence and does nothing to truly forestall crime within the first place,” Hollins stated.

The state’s jail inhabitants had soared for 35 years, beginning within the mid-Seventies, as legislators and voters handed a collection of legal guidelines rising and mandating a number of the nation’s most extreme sentences. The variety of inmates had reached 143,000 in 2011, almost twice the prisons’ designed capability, earlier than the U.S. Supreme Courtroom intervened and ordered a swift discount of greater than 30,000 to allow enhancements within the prisons’ woeful well being care system.

Lawmakers responded with measures transferring hundreds of state prisoners to county jails, whereas voters exempted some lesser crimes from potential life phrases beneath the state’s 1994 “three strikes” legislation, decreased sentences for minor drug and theft crimes, and narrowed prosecutors’ authority to cost youths in grownup courts. The present inhabitants is 95,699, nonetheless almost 9% above the prisons’ designed capability.

Non-public prisons had been focused by the state after stories that they had been much less protected and had worse well being care than authorities correctional services. A 2020 California legislation required the state to shut these prisons when their present contracts expired, or by 2028 on the newest.

A federal appeals courtroom dominated in September that the state couldn’t use its legislation to shutter immigration prisons run by personal contractors due to the federal authorities’s authority over immigration. The courtroom didn’t invalidate the legislation’s ban on personal prisons for inmates convicted of felony prices, however officers stated the necessary shutdown didn’t cowl the power in California Metropolis as a result of it’s truly leased and operated by the state, although owned by CoreCivic. That left the choice as much as the Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which stated it might shut the power when its contract expires in 2024.

Bob Egelko is a San Francisco Chronicle workers author. E-mail: begelko@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BobEgelko