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Prison officials said Saturday that they are investigating Monday's death at California State Prison, Corcoran as a possible suicide. They are awaiting the Kings County coroner's report before making a final determination on the cause of death.
More than 30,000 of the 133,000 inmates in California prisons have refused at least one meal in support of inmates held in solitary confinement at Pelican Bay State Prison, corrections officials said Tuesday.
California prisoners have unprotected sexual contact, forced or consensual, even if both are illegal, and this reality often leads to the spread of HIV and other diseases in prisons and in communities where felons are paroled.
State corrections officials say they will comply with a federal court order to move thousands of inmates out of two Central Valley prisons where an airborne fungus has led to widespread illnesses.
The head of California's prison system said Tuesday a court order to evacuate thousands of inmates from two Central Valley lockups hit hard by an infectious disease could lead to racial conflicts elsewhere.
A panel of federal judges has rejected Gov. Jerry Brown's attempt to circumvent its long-standing order for reducing California's prison population.
A federal judge in San Francisco on Monday is scheduled to consider whether an airborne fungus that occurs naturally in the San Joaquin Valley presents enough of a public health danger that thousands of vulnerable state prison inmates should be moved to other locations.
Richard Ramirez, the notorious serial killer known as the Night Stalker, died early Friday in a hospital, a state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation official said.
One inmate died and two others were seriously injured in a fight Monday that involved about 40 inmates at a state prison in the San Joaquin Valley, corrections officials said.
California may speed up the release of some inmates while allowing other inmates with a violent history to become firefighters, under a proposal to cut crowding in state prisons Gov. Jerry Brown filed late Thursday night.
A California parole agent was accused of soliciting one of his parolees to kill another. Numerous corrections department employees allegedly had sex with inmates, including juveniles.
A federal judge in Sacramento is set to hear arguments Wednesday over Gov. Jerry Brown's push to regain state control of inmate mental health care after 18 years of federal oversight and billions of dollars spent to improve treatment.
Nearly two decades after a court takeover of California's prison mental health system, a federal judge is set to consider this week whether the billions of dollars invested by California taxpayers have improved conditions enough that he can return control to the state.
California has spent billions of dollars and endured years of federal lawsuits to improve conditions in its state prisons, but the problems it has been trying to correct are now trickling down to local governments as county jails deal with thousands of additional inmates.
The number of paroled sex offenders who are fugitives in California is 15 percent higher today than before Gov. Jerry Brown's sweeping law enforcement realignment law took effect 17 months ago, according to figures released Wednesday by the state corrections department.
Gov. Jerry Brown has begun aggressively challenging federal court oversight of California's prison system by highlighting what he says is a costly conflict of interest: The private law firms representing inmates and the judges' own hand-picked authorities benefit financially by keeping the cases alive.
Three major skill gaps in Sacramento are currently providing job opportunities: nursing, security and criminal justice.
Criminal justice continues to be a burgeoning field for job seekers.
Gov. Jerry Brown is challenging a federal court order that California further reduce its inmate population to improve prison conditions, reigniting a legal battle that once reached the U.S. Supreme Court.
The rate at which California prison parolees commit new crimes has dropped slightly for the second straight year, an improvement that corrections officials partly attribute to recent rehabilitation efforts.
A professional clown has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after DNA evidence tied him to the 2002 rape of a 12-year-old girl he abducted while in full costume.
A registered sex offender was arrested Tuesday for sexually assaulting a teen on a public bus in Modesto, only one day after he was released from state prison.
According to a report from non-profit watchdog California Common Sense, the state now spends more on prisons than universities.
The U.S. is locking up more illegal immigrants than ever and generating lucrative business for the nation's largest prison companies.
California prison officials want to halt a $4 billion prison-construction program and bring back all inmates held out of state as part of a wide-ranging department restructuring.
