Chuckawalla Valley State Prison in Blythe to close by 2025 as Newsom cuts costs
Gov. Gavin Newsom's plan to cut incarceration costs across the state has a prison in Blythe on the chopping block.
Chuckawalla Valley State Prison will close in just more than 2 years – by March 2025.
The announcement came Tuesday from California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, "with an eye toward fiscal responsibility."
CDCR officials said Chuckawalla's inmates will be relocated starting in 2024 to facilities across the state.
The agency is also working to transfer staffers into positions at other institutions.
"We're making strides in not only imprisoning people and letting them out, but also in rehabilitating them so that they can rejoin society," said Vanessa Nelson-Sloane, director of prison advocacy non-profit Life Support Alliance.
Chuckawalla's closure, Nelson-Sloane said, comes as the state's prison population is shrinking.
Last week, there were about 94,000 people incarcerated. That's down from about 120,000 in 2019.
Chuckawalla is the third California prison being closed by Newsom's administration in an effort to cut the state's $14.2 billion corrections budget.
"That's a nearly 60% increase in prison spending from just a decade ago. So we really need to get serious about balancing the scales of our investments," said Will Mathews with Californians for Safety and Justice.
Mathews said the state is redirecting money away from prisons and instead toward crime prevention and other local public safety programs.
"It really provides a glimpse into what is possible in California, if we were to invest in crime prevention to scale," Mathews said. "That is really the key."
