State prisons head who led changes sets date to retire
State prisons chief Ralph Diaz, who presided over the final stages of a huge courtordered reduction in inmate population as well as the system’s sometimes-bungled response to COVID19, is retiring in October, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Friday.
Newsom said he would nominate one of Diaz’s top aides, Kathleen Allison, to succeed him.
Diaz, who began work as a guard at Wasco State Prison in 1991 and later served as warden at the prison in Corcoran (Kings County), was appointed secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation by Gov. Jerry Brown in September 2018.
Seven years earlier, the U.S. Supreme Court had ordered California to reduce the population of its overcrowded prisons by 40,000 to allow improvements in a substandard health care system. Brown responded with a legislatively approved plan to sentence thousands of convicted felons to county jail instead of state prison, and voters passed a series of measures to shorten sentences and make some inmates newly eligible for parole.
The changes begun under Diaz’s predecessors and continued under his watch have reduced the prison population to below 98,000, more than 50,000 below the 2011 level. though still about 9% above the institutions’ designed capacity. Newsom said Friday that Diaz had led the overall population-reduction efforts. Crime rates, meanwhile, remained relatively stable, and have declined during the coronavirus pandemic.
“I am confident that our department’s transformative focus on rehabilitation will continue to result in safer prisons, healthier communities, and lower recidivism,” Diaz said in a statement released by Newsom’s office. The department added “rehabilitation” to its name in 2004.
If the department’s image was bolstered by its response to the court’s population order, however, it has been dimmed by its handling of the coronavirus.
After an outbreak of the disease at the California Institution for Men in Chino (San Bernardino County), the courtappointed receiver in charge of prison health care, J. Clark Kelso, ordered the transfer in late May of 121 aging or medically vulnerable inmates to San Quentin, where no cases had been reported.
The transfers, approved by Diaz’s office, took place after the inmates had tested negative for the coronavirus. But prison officials overlooked the fact that some of the tests had been conducted four weeks earlier, leaving ample time for the men to become infected before leaving.
San Quentin reported its first cases soon after the transfers and now has more than 2,200 cases and 26 inmate deaths. Overall, the prison system has reported 10,400 cases and 57 deaths among inmates, and more than 2,700 cases and nine deaths among prison staff.
“The spread of COVID19 at state prisons was a preventable public health disaster and a failure of CDCR leadership at the highest level,” Assemblyman Marc Levine, DSan Rafael, whose district includes San Quentin, said Friday.
Michael Bien, an attorney for inmates who has argued for releases on a much larger scale during the pandemic, said there was plenty of blame to go around.
“I think he was put in a very difficult situation,” Bien said of Diaz. “CDCR remains dangerously overcrowded, as evidenced by its inability to handle the pandemic. He doesn’t control overcrowding,” which has more to do with state sentencing laws.
Newsom did not mention the missteps in his announcement, saying instead that Diaz “has worked tirelessly with public health and law enforcement partners to ensure collaboration and cooperation during these unprecedented times.” The governor said the number of COVID19 cases in the prisons on Thursday was the lowest since late May.
Allison, 55, Diaz’s designated successor, is a nurse who joined the department as a medical assistant in 1987, later became warden at Corcoran and is now the department’s undersecretary of operations. Her appointment requires state Senate confirmation and pays $279,216 a year.
“I am confident she will continue to lead CDCR through innovative transformation, including focusing on rehabilitative opportunities for individuals both inside and outside of prison, and continuing the path for restorative justice,” Newsom said.