Which 10 Prisons Are Closing in California? 5 Full, 6 Partial

Five California state prisons have closed or are scheduled to close under Governor Gavin Newsom, and six other prisons have had individual yards or housing units shut down. The prisons closing in California, in order, are Deuel Vocational Institution in Tracy, the California Correctional Center in Susanville, California City Correctional Facility, Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe, and the California Rehabilitation Center in Norco. The Legislative Analyst’s Office has flagged at least one more full closure as likely within the next few years.¹

The Five Full Closures

Deuel Vocational Institution (Tracy)

DVI was the first to go. CDCR announced the closure in September 2020, and the facility officially shut down on September 30, 2021.² The site sits on roughly 779 acres with more than 1.2 million square feet of structures and was one of the oldest prisons in the state’s inventory.³ Reports indicate the property has drawn interest for warehouse and logistics redevelopment, though no final plan has been publicly adopted.

California Correctional Center (Susanville)

CCC closed in June 2023, taking with it fourteen associated fire camps that had operated under the prison’s umbrella.⁴ The closure was deeply contested. Lassen County filed legal challenges arguing the shutdown would devastate the local economy. The facility was placed in “warm shutdown” mode, meaning essential maintenance continues so it could theoretically be reactivated if the state needed the beds again.³

California City Correctional Facility

California City was unusual: a state-operated prison on property owned by the private company CoreCivic. CDCR issued a lease termination notice citing the declining inmate population, and state prison operations ended in March 2024.⁴ The 2,560-bed facility had generated over $33 million per year in rental revenue for CoreCivic. By mid-2025, the site had been repurposed as a federal immigration processing center under a new CoreCivic contract, a move that drew significant controversy in California.

Chuckawalla Valley State Prison (Blythe)

Chuckawalla was originally slated for closure by March 2025, but the Department of Finance proposed accelerating the timeline, and the prison shut down in October 2024.⁴ Its design capacity was 1,738 beds.⁵

California Rehabilitation Center (Norco)

CRC is the most recent full closure announced and is on track to shut down by fall 2026.⁶ One of its yards, Facility A, was already deactivated in spring 2023 as part of an earlier round of partial shutdowns.⁷

Partial Deactivations at Six Other Prisons

Beyond the full closures, CDCR announced in December 2022 that it would deactivate individual yards or housing units at six additional prisons. The prisons remain open, but specific sections went offline, reducing bed counts and staffing needs. The six are:⁷

Folsom Women’s Facility, deactivated January 2023.
West Facility at California Men’s Colony, deactivated winter 2023.
Facility C at Pelican Bay State Prison, deactivated winter 2023.
Facility A at California Rehabilitation Center, deactivated spring 2023.
Facility D at California Institution for Men, deactivated spring 2023.
Facility D at California Correctional Institution, deactivated summer 2023.

For staff and incarcerated people assigned to those specific yards, the practical impact was close to a full closure. Everyone had to be relocated.

What’s Likely Next

In its 2026-27 budget analysis, the Legislative Analyst’s Office found that California could close at least one more prison within the next few years and still retain a comfortable buffer against unexpected population increases. The LAO specifically identified the Correctional Training Facility in Soledad as a strong candidate, citing four reasons: the facility doesn’t serve a unique function that would be hard to relocate, it lacks modern housing units, it isn’t designated for specialized healthcare, and it has particularly high infrastructure needs.¹

The LAO recommended that the Legislature direct CDCR to begin planning a closure in 2027-28 or as soon as logistics allow, and urged lawmakers to reject infrastructure spending proposals for Soledad to avoid pouring money into a facility that could be shuttered shortly after. Whether the administration follows through is uncertain. The Governor vetoed Assembly Bill 2178 in 2024, which would have set mandatory targets for reducing empty beds from 11,300 in 2025-26 down to 2,500 by 2029-30. That veto suggests the executive branch wants to keep discretion over the pace of closures rather than have it set by statute.

Why California Is Closing Prisons

The driving force is population math. California’s prison population peaked above 173,000 in 2006 and has fallen to roughly 94,000, largely because of sentencing reforms, realignment policies that shifted lower-level offenders to county supervision, and voter-approved measures like Propositions 36, 47, and 57.⁸ The state now operates roughly 15,000 to 19,000 empty beds, a number projected to grow.⁹ Every empty bed still costs money to heat, staff, and maintain, and the LAO estimates each full prison closure saves around $150 million per year in operating costs.¹

How People Inside Are Transferred

When a prison is selected for closure, CDCR works through the population case by case to match each person with an appropriate receiving facility. The department evaluates custody needs, medical requirements, and programming, and transfers go to institutions that can meet each person’s housing classification, whether that’s a minimum-security Level I setting or a high-security Level IV environment.⁷

Credits earned for educational, vocational, and self-help programs transfer with the individual, and anyone in the middle of a course gets the chance to finish. Physical moves happen in phases, typically by state transport buses. Incarcerated individuals are told of their transfer in advance, though exact dates are generally withheld for security. Once someone is processed at the new facility, families can track the move through CDCR’s inmate locator.

In practice, a person may lose access to a specific rehabilitative program, a visiting schedule that worked for their family, or proximity to their legal counsel. CDCR’s stated commitment is to equivalent or better programming at receiving facilities, but thousands of simultaneous transfers strain even well-run institutions.

What Happens to Staff

Correctional officers and civilian staff don’t simply lose their jobs when a prison closes. Employees at a closing facility receive “surplus” status, which triggers the State Restriction of Appointments process. SROA gives displaced workers priority consideration for vacant positions at other state agencies and prisons; departments filling openings must consider SROA-eligible employees before hiring from the general applicant pool.¹⁰

Bargaining units 2, 9, and 18, which include peace officers and related classifications, have a stronger version called Super SROA. Under those contracts, departments must offer positions to employees facing layoff who meet the minimum qualifications, work in a neighboring county, and serve in a transfer-eligible classification. One thing employees should check carefully before accepting a transfer: seniority credit earned for layoff purposes can be lost when transferring to a classification covered by a different collective bargaining agreement. The new department’s personnel office is the only reliable source for how seniority will carry over.¹¹

What Happens to the Buildings and the Towns

California’s deactivated prisons are initially placed in warm shutdown, where basic maintenance keeps the buildings from deteriorating so they could theoretically reopen. Warm shutdown isn’t free, and the longer a site sits idle, the more pressure builds to find a permanent use. The state also keeps paying debt service on construction bonds for closed facilities. Prison bonds typically run 20 to 30 years, and closing the building doesn’t accelerate or void that obligation. These stranded costs mean the state isn’t saving the full operating budget of a closed prison; it’s saving operations minus bond payments it cannot escape.

Repurposing has produced mixed results. The former DVI property in Tracy has drawn interest for warehouse and logistics development given its proximity to Bay Area distribution networks. The former California City facility took a more controversial path, reopening as a federal immigration processing center under CoreCivic’s management by mid-2025.

The hardest part of these closures is often economic. Many California prisons were deliberately sited in small, rural communities during the prison-building boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Over decades, those towns built their tax bases, school enrollments, and local businesses around the prison payroll. When CCC closed in Susanville, the community lost what was essentially its largest employer, and the legal fight Lassen County waged to stop the closure reflected that reality. California has not established a formal prison redevelopment fund or commission of the kind New York created after its own wave of closures. The state’s approach has been largely facility by facility, leaving local governments to compete for whatever economic development resources they can find.

1
Legislative Analyst’s Office. The 2026-27 Budget: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
2
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. CDCR Announces State Prison Closure
3
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Deactivated Adult and Juvenile Facilities
4
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Reduction/Closure Information – Prison Closures
5
California Department of Finance. Budget Change Proposal – Closure of Chuckawalla Valley State Prison
6
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. California Rehabilitation Center to Close by Fall 2026
7
California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Prison Closure, Facility Deactivations
8
Public Policy Institute of California. California’s Prison Population
9
Legislative Analyst’s Office. The 2024-25 Budget: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation
10
California Department of Human Resources. 2602 – State Restriction of Appointments (SROA)
11
CalCareers. Transfers