Central California Women’s Facility
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| Location | Chowchilla, California |
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| Coordinates | 37°05′37″N 120°09′10″W / 37.0935°N 120.1528°WCoordinates: 37°05′37″N 120°09′10″W / 37.0935°N 120.1528°W |
| Status | Operational |
| Security class | Minimum-maximum |
| Capacity | 2,004 |
| Population | 3,676 (183.4%) (as of 31 December 2012) |
| Opened | October 1990 |
| Managed by | California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation |
| Warden | Derral Adams |
Central California Women's Facility (CCWF) is a female-only California Department of Corrections state prison located in Chowchilla, California. It is across the road from Valley State Prison. CCWF prison is the largest female correctional facility in the United States, and houses the State of California's death row for women.
CCWF covers 640 acres (260 ha). As of Fiscal Year 2006/2007, CCWF had a total of 1,205 staff and an annual operating budget of US$138 million. As of March 2012, the facility's total population was 2,836, or more than 141.5 percent of its design capacity of 2,004.
CCWF holds prisoners at almost all security levels:
Level I through Level IV are all housed together inside a 32-room housing unit. There are 256 inmates of all levels housed together with only three Correctional Officers. On the Reception Yard there are 276 inmates per housing unit of unclassified inmates supervised by only two officers.
The prison provides inmate academic education, work and vocational training, counseling and specialized programs for the purpose of successful reintegration into society.
TransMetro provides bus transportation to CCFW. The Chowchilla Family Express previously provided transportation for family members from major California cities to visit prisoners at the facility until its closure on June 30, 2014.
The Madera County board of supervisors gave the prison its current name in 1989 "after months of discussion and disagreement." CCWF opened in October 1990, having cost $141 million to construct.
In 1996, the City of Chowchilla was given permission to perform a "non-contiguous annexation" of CCWF.
Starting in April 2007, CCWF received some inmates from California Rehabilitation Center after closure of the women's wing at that prison. The population at CCWF "swelled by 8 percent."
Health services at CCWF have been the subject of controversy over the years, as exemplified by the following events:
As of 2007, of the prison guards, 31% were women. 19% of sergeants were women, and less than 1% of lieutenants are women.
After Governor Pete Wilson decreed in December 1991 that CCWF shall hold all-female death row inmates in California, Maureen McDermott became the first Death Row inmate at CCWF. Initially a set of nine cells in the 270 building, a two story building for difficult to manage and maximum security prisoners, served as the women's death row. The first inmate was Maureen McDermott, the first woman sentenced to death in a period of several decades; and, for a period, she was the only person in the unit.
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