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

California Correctional Health Care Services and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Caused a Public Health Disaster at San Quentin State Prison When They Transferred Medically Vulnerable Incarcerated Persons From the California Institution for Men Without Taking Proper Safeguards. Our review of the transfer of 189 incarcerated persons from CIM to San Quentin and CSP-Corcoran determined the efforts by CCHCS and CDCR to prepare for and execute the transfers were deeply flawed and risked the health and lives of thousands of incarcerated persons and staff members. Executives from each agency ignored concerns health care staff raised that the persons had not recently been tested for COVID-19 before the transfer. Prison staff further increased the risk of transmission by performing temperature and symptom screening of 55 incarcerated persons at least more than 6 hours before they boarded the buses. San Quentin staff then housed almost all of the incoming incarcerated persons in cells without solid doors, which allowed the virus to flow in and out of the cells freely. Although Corcoran staff housed the incarcerated persons in cells with solid doors, both prisons failed to properly conduct contact tracing investigations, increasing the risk that the virus would spread to other incarcerated persons and staff.

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated persons at the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco between July 2019 and February 2020. We rated the overall quality of health care provided at CRC during this time period as Adequate.