California prison system

The California State Prison System is administered by the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Division of Adult Institutions, which had 136,000 inmates as of 2014.

The California system has been the origin of many trends in prison conditions within the United States as a whole. The state's large and diverse population, large size, large urban areas, high rates of violent crime, criminal street gangs, tough sentencing laws and its status as an entry point to the U.S. for both immigrants and drugs has given California a large and complex prison environment. California prisons are overcrowded, with a number of facilities holding more than 200% of their design capacity.

The system, like the state as a whole, lacks a racial/ethnic majority among the population, with Hispanic inmates making up approximately 87% of the population, African American and white inmates each representing about 27%, and other inmates representing 8% as of 2006. Prisoner identification and affiliation is tied closely to race and region of the state, which has contributed to tension and violence. There has been a long running racial tension between African American and Southern Mexican American prison gangs and significant riots in California prisons where Mexican inmates and African Americans have targeted each other particularly, based on racial reasons. California is the birthplace of the United States' most powerful and well-known prison gangs, including the Aryan Brotherhood, Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia, and the Black Guerrilla Family. State efforts against these gangs made California a pioneer in the development of Security Housing Unit "supermax" control-unit facilities.

The overcrowded conditions and accusations of inadequate medical facilities and mistreatment have caused the federal courts to intervene in the system's operation since the 1990s, appointing special oversight and enforcing consent decrees over the system's medical system and the SHU units and capping populations at several facilities. As of 2007, by order of federal courts, the system's medical system is under federal receivership, and a federal court may impose a mandatory limit on the system's total population by June 2007.

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