Publications

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated persons at Pelican Bay State Prison between November 2020 and April 2021. We rated the overall quality of health care provided at Pelican Bay State Prison during this time period as adequate.

This report presents the results of our monitoring of 204 of the 257 staff misconduct inquiries the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation completed as part of a special project it launched after receiving sworn declarations disabled incarcerated persons filed in federal court in 2020 and 2021 identifying allegations of staff misconduct at the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility. Among the concerns we identified during our monitoring were significant delays in completing the inquiries, poor investigative work performed by the assigned investigators, compromised confidentiality during the inquiry process, and several inappropriate decisions the warden made following the inquiries.

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated persons at Kern Valley State Prison between July 2020 and December 2020. We rated the overall quality of health care provided at Kern Valley State Prison during this time period as inadequate.

This annual report summarizes the work the Office of the Inspector General completed during 2021, including the 18 public reports we issued. The recommendations we made to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2021, as well as the department’s responses and plans to address our recommendations can be found on our Data Explorer.

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated persons at Centinela State Prison between September 2020 and February 2021. We rated the overall quality of health care provided at Centinela State Prison during this time period as adequate.

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated persons at Central California Women’s Facility between August 2020 and January 2021. We rated the overall quality of health care provided at Central California Women’s Facility during this time period as adequate.

This report evaluates the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s progress meeting the components of its 2012 Blueprint plan that it had not previously met—adhering to the standardized staffing model for education programs and increasing the total number of offenders served in rehabilitative programs. The report also evaluates various changes the department made following its 2016 Update to the Blueprint in rehabilitative program expansion, specialized housing, gang management, and population management.

This report addresses the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s (the department) internal investigations and employee discipline cases that we monitored and closed between January 1, 2021, and June 30, 2021. We concluded that the department’s performance in conducting internal investigations and handling employee discipline cases was overall poor in the 109 cases we monitored and closed during this time period. We assessed the department’s performance as satisfactory in 57 cases and poor in 52 cases. We also determined that the department’s delays in processing dismissal cases during this reporting period resulted in unnecessary costs to the department and taxpayers totaling $299,304; over the past two and one-half years, the department has unnecessarily paid approximately $1,314,489 in salary and benefits to its employees due to these delays.

The department initially dismissed a sergeant who allegedly communicated with an undercover detective posing as a 16-year-old female with the intent to commit sex acts with a minor. The department later settled the case, allowing the sergeant to resign in lieu of termination and agreeing to remove the disciplinary action from the sergeant’s personnel file. However, the department violated its policy when it failed to include a no-rehire clause prohibiting the sergeant from applying for or accepting employment with the department in the future. As a result, the sergeant is free to apply for and accept employment with any State agency, including the department. In the report, we identify significant concerns with the decision not to include the mandatory no-rehire language and recommend the department include these provisions in all future settlement agreements that permit an employee to resign in lieu of being dismissed from state service.