Investigators working at a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation prison performed an inadequate inquiry into allegations that several staff members at the prison failed to wear face coverings in mid-November 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite a reasonable belief that staff misconduct occurred, the warden failed to refer the case to the Office of Internal Affairs for an investigation, opting to have prison employees perform an inquiry instead. This Sentinel Case report describes the detailed information an incarcerated person provided concerning the alleged offenses, the investigators’ substandard inquiry into the misconduct allegations, the disregard for departmental policy for handling incarcerated persons’ allegations of staff misconduct, and the lack of action taken against the staff members accused of committing the alleged misconduct.

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated persons at North Kern State Prison in Delano between November 2019 and April 2020. We rated the overall quality of health care provided at the North Kern State Prison during this time period as adequate.

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated persons at the California Medical Facility between September 2019 and February 2020. We rated the overall quality of health care provided at the California Medical Facility during this time period as inadequate.

Discipline Monitoring Report, July – December 2020 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 July 1, 2020, and December 31, 2020. We concluded that the department’s performance in conducting internal investigations and handling employee discipline cases was overall poor in the 138 cases we monitored and closed during this time period. We assessed the department’s performance as satisfactory in 86 cases and poor in 53 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 $174,578; over the past four six-month reporting periods, the department has unnecessarily paid approximately $1,015,185 in salary and benefits to its employees due to these delays.

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated persons at California State Prison, Corcoran between August 2019 and January 2020. We rated the overall quality of health care provided at California State Prison, Corcoran during this time period as Inadequate.

This annual report summarizes the work the Office of the Inspector General completed during 2020, including the 22 public reports we issued. The report also enumerates the recommendations we made to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation in 2020, as well as the department’s responses and plans to address our recommendations.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation: Its Recent Steps Meant to Improve the Handling of Incarcerated Persons’ Allegations of Staff Misconduct Failed to Achieve Two Fundamental Objectives: Independence and Fairness; Despite Revising Its Regulatory Framework and Being Awarded Approximately $10 Million of Annual Funding, Its Process Remains Broken.
In this report, we examine the department’s recently revised statewide process for examining incarcerated persons’ allegations of staff misconduct and the new unit the department created to perform investigations into these allegations – the Allegation Inquiry Management Section (AIMS). The report, which examines this process over a five month period between April 2020 and August 2020, found that wardens largely avoided referring staff misconduct grievances to AIMS, which opened only 86 inquiries per month, despite being funded to perform more than five times that amount. Our examination of the process identified flaws in its design that prevent wardens from referring allegations to AIMS for handling and preclude AIMS from handling various types of allegations. We conclude that the department has not increased the independence or fairness of this process, as wardens are exonerating staff in 98% of the allegations and the department’s limited information system prevents it from effectively assessing its own process.

Fact sheet containing the most significant findings contained within Part 3 of our COVID-19 Review Series