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The end of May is the end of the line for National Park Service ranger John Cantwell, who has been the public face of Alcatraz Island for years. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Google plans to expand a program to help formerly incarcerated people receive job training and skills, pegged to a White House effort aimed at helping people stay out of prison and jail. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Nearly half the Senate's Democrats, including both of California's, are urging President Biden to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - "a symbol of lawlessness and human rights abuses" - and complete a task that President Barack Obama failed to accomplish. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Citing a dwindling number of people incarcerated in the state's prison system, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced that it is closing a prison in Susanville - the second prison closure announced in a year. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On display in the Bay Area [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The death of a 66-year-old man found in his San Quentin cell early Wednesday morning is being investigated as a homicide, while his 28-year-old cellmate has been named as the suspect, prison officials said Wednesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Regulators have fined the California prison system more than $400,000 for what they said were health violations - many of them coronavirus-related - at San Quentin State Prison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

California prison officials and medical staff sparked a "public health disaster" with their botched handling of prisoner transfers to San Quentin and Corcoran state prisons last year, the state's Office of Inspector General said in a blistering report Monday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A former state prison guard in Sacramento pleaded guilty Tuesday to lying about the actions of another guard who fatally injured an inmate by pulling the man's legs out from under him and sending him sprawling to the floor on his head, federal prosecutors said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A former state prison guard in Sacramento pleaded guilty Tuesday to lying about the actions of another guard who fatally injured an inmate by pulling the man's legs out from under him and sending him sprawling to the floor on his head, federal prosecutors said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The San Francisco man accused of killing two women after speeding through a red light in a stolen car on New Year's Eve pleaded not guilty Tuesday to an array of charges as a judge ordered him to remain in jail. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As COVID-19 swept through San Quentin State Prison, a California appeals court took the dramatic step in October of ordering the release or transfer of at least half of the prison's inmates. But the court acted without hearing testimony from prison officials, inmates or medical experts, and now the state Supreme Court has put the order on hold and told the appellate panel to take another look. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A fast-moving coronavirus outbreak at FCI Dublin, a federal women's prison in Alameda County, has infected more than 20% of the prison's population, according to data released Wednesday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As coronavirus cases soar in California prisons, officials at San Quentin State Prison on Monday began a series of mandatory transfers that have proceeded against the advice of the prison's own medical personnel, according to prison doctors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the coronavirus tore through California prisons this summer, a chorus of activists, health officials, doctors and judges implored Gov. Gavin Newsom to shrink the state's inmate population and release some of the sickest and frailest prisoners - those most likely to die if they contracted COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

For a month now, 35-year-old Clifford Meyer has watched a coronavirus outbreak explode at the California prison where he is incarcerated, feeling helpless to protect himself. But recently he decided to say something - and ended up in handcuffs, he told The Chronicle. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State prison officials are planning to transfer dozens of young men to the Valley State Prison in Chowchilla - a facility that is already overcrowded, at 139% of its design capacity, and where 27 prisoners have tested positive for the coronavirus in the past two weeks, according to interviews with multiple incarcerated people. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Finding that state officials have acted with "deliberate indifference" to the health of prisoners at San Quentin - where 75% of them have tested positive for the coronavirus and 28 have died - a state appeals court took the unprecedented step Tuesday of ordering at least half of the prison's 2,900 inmates transferred or released. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Time is elastic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SACRAMENTO - Amid continuing coronavirus outbreaks in the California prison system, a group of state lawmakers called Friday for a federal judge to replace the court-appointed receiver who oversees prison health care. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SACRAMENTO - California will close its first prison in nearly two decades when it shuts down a lockup in Tracy next year, state corrections officials said Friday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Finding that state prison guards in San Diego regularly assaulted inmates with disabilities, tossed some of them out of their wheelchairs and rarely faced discipline, a federal judge has ordered the prison to install cameras, upgrade its staff training and submit to court monitoring. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The state's workplace safety regulator has ordered San Quentin's dental clinic to cease many of its operations, citing practices that have "contributed to the spread" of COVID-19 in the state prison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SACRAMENTO - As California battles through another devastating wildfire season, state legislators have passed a bill that would make it easier for formerly incarcerated people to become firefighters. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SACRAMENTO - Transgender women who face brutality being housed among men in California prisons could soon be allowed to decide whether to be housed in a women's facility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State prisons chief Ralph Diaz, who presided over the final stages of a huge court-ordered reduction in inmate population as well as the system's sometimes-bungled response to COVID-19, is retiring in October, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

SACRAMENTO - As a transgender woman, Jasmine Jones said California's prison system constantly put her life at risk during the 17 years she spent behind bars by housing her among men. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

San Francisco's crumbling, seismically unsafe County Jail No. 4 will close its doors for good Sept. 5. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the coronavirus sweeps through San Quentin State Prison, a state appeals court says it may order the prison to grant supervised release to hundreds of aging or medically vulnerable inmates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two days after California prison officials in late May shipped busloads of prisoners from a coronavirus hot spot in Chino to San Quentin State Prison, Marin County's top public health officer issued urgent guidance to the prison's leadership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A veteran sergeant at San Quentin died Sunday morning after a weeks-long battle with COVID-19, marking the first employee to be felled by an outbreak that has ravaged California's oldest state prison. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In June, on Death Row at San Quentin State Prison, 58-year-old Jarvis Masters heard a rumor that the coronavirus was ripping through the aging structure. Condemned prisoners are confined to their cells for 23 hours a day, so Masters tracked the outbreak by watching news reports on his small personal TV. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

aThe coronavirus is spiking in California's youth prisons, but the state is not releasing young prisoners for their safety as it has done in adult lockups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

California's prison population of 99,000 is its lowest since 1990 and 74,000 below its peak in 2006. Court rulings, new state laws and policies on imprisonment, and changes in voters' attitudes have all contributed to the reduction, which has not led to any statewide increase in crime. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Like a lot of people with newfound interest in Buddhist meditation, Jarvis Jay Masters struggled at first to sit still and quiet his mind. His thoughts wandered. Noises distracted him. Sometimes he was flooded with dark, shameful memories, so instead of serenity he felt panic. He worried he wasn't breathing right. Most of all, he wondered, "Why bother?" [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The California prison population dropped below 100,000 people for the first time in three decades on Thursday, officials said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On his first day at San Quentin State Prison in early 2006, freshly transferred from solitary confinement at Avenal State Prison, Troy Williams walked onto the yard ready for a fight. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A condemned inmate at San Quentin State Prison died Monday from suspected COVID-19 complications, officials said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The deadly outbreak of COVID-19 at San Quentin State Prison resulted from a mass transfer of inmates from a virus-plagued prison in Southern California, a transfer approved by J. Clark Kelso, the court-appointed receiver in charge of health care in the state's penal institutions. A legislator whose district includes San Quentin says Kelso should be fired from the job he has held since 2008. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

More than 100 inmates at Santa Rita Jail are infected with coronavirus after it spread unseen from bunk-to-bunk and cell-to-cell in the past two days, marking the jail's largest outbreak since the pandemic began, officials said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A condemned inmate in San Quentin State Prison tried to stab a correctional officer in the neck on Thursday, instead slashing the officer's hand, officials said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Two San Quentin inmates died Saturday from what appears to be complications with COVID-19, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Sunday, bringing the total number of prisoner deaths at the state prison to nine. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gov. Gavin Newsom will release approximately 8,000 people incarcerated inside California's prison system by the end of August in an effort to save lives amid devastating coronavirus outbreaks at several facilities and pressure from lawmakers and advocates. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Outside the black main gates of San Quentin State Prison, a crowd of more than 50 gathered Thursday to call on Gov. Gavin Newsom to immediately reduce the prison's population to save lives amid an explosive and deadly coronavirus outbreak inside the North Bay facility. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As the coronavirus rages through California's crowded state prisons, threatening those inside and straining community hospitals, pressure is building on Gov. Gavin Newsom to avert a wider public-health crisis by drastically cutting prison populations - including at San Quentin in Marin County, now home to one of the country's biggest COVID-19 outbreaks. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Cambodian refugee who was released on parole from San Quentin State Prison on Wednesday was not arrested by immigration authorities and, instead, welcomed by advocates who have rallied for his release into the Bay Area community. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

State lawmakers skewered prison officials on Wednesday over their handling of a coronavirus crisis that has killed 22 incarcerated people across the state and infected nearly 5,000 others, taking special aim at prison transfers that effectively delivered the virus to multiple institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A Cambodian refugee is set to be released from San Quentin State Prison on Wednesday and could be handed to immigration authorities, who could deport him, and immigration advocates are calling on the governor to intervene and help the man, who they say has COVID-19 symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Former California senator Leland Yee was released from federal prison on Friday after serving a five-year sentence for a corruption scandal, officials said. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]