Despite a year of legal sanctions and budget cuts, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation takes an upbeat tone in its new annual report. Inspirationally titled "Corrections Moving Forward" [25 mb PDF], the report opens with a letter from the CDCR secretary Matthew Cate, who writes that "in the midst of significant challenges, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has quietly had a remarkable string of successes in the last year. While it is easy to focus on the negative, there have been many positive developments at our agency."

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Tags: Exclusives, Featured, Prisons & Public Health

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog In a recent Washington Post op-ed, Tracy Velazquez of the Justice Policy Institute said national health-care reform could keep people out of jail. “Every year, thousands of people are locked up in U.S. prisons and jails because they [...]

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Tags: Exclusives, Prisons & Public Health

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog Facing a court-ordered deadline to reduce overcrowded state prison populations, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger released a plan last Friday (PDF) that would revisit a previously rejected “early release” program, along with other measures. Early release would place elderly, medically [...]

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Tags: Exclusives, Prisons & Public Health

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog Women parolees in San Francisco and Alameda counties face long waiting lists for access to health and welfare services, many of which are unreachable by the phone numbers in official resource guides, according to a recent survey by [...]

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Tags: Exclusives, Prisons & Public Health

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog How will California resolve its chronic prison overcrowding problems? With court-imposed deadlines ahead, the answer is as murky as ever. Sept. 18 Deadline Looms In August, following class-action litigation filed by California inmates, a federal court found that [...]

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Tags: Exclusives, Prisons & Public Health

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog The Sacramento Bee has posted some new online maps in advance of the potential release of 27,000 California inmates due to budget cuts, and another 40,000 thanks to a federal court order to curb prison overcrowding. Last week’s [...]

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Tags: Exclusives, Prisons & Public Health

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog In a recent New York Times op-ed, columnist Nicholas Kristof cites the case of Curtis Wilkerson as an example of lopsided budget priorities (“Priority Test: Health Care or Prisons?”), wherein health care is considered too expensive, yet long [...]

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Tags: Exclusives, Prisons & Public Health

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog With 40,000 inmates slated for release in the next two years due a federal court order targeting overcrowding in California prisons, what to do with all those convicts re-entering society is at the top of peoples’ minds. (In [...]

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Tags: Exclusives, Prisons & Public Health

By Bernice Yeung | Crowdfund this with Spot.Us Part of the Prisons & Public Health news blog Fresh from lockup and battling a host of health problems — including chronic illness, addiction and mental illness — a majority of California parolees wind up in a handful of cities like Los Angeles, Oakland and San Diego. [...]

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Tags: Exclusives, Prisons & Public Health

Newsdesk.org’s latest collaboration with Spot.Us is “Prisons & Public Health,” a news blog by reporter Bernice Yeung tracking the public-health impacts of California’s prison system. Help crowdfund this project!

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Tags: Prisons & Public Health