Publications

The Office of the Inspector General (the OIG), as part of our statute, maintains an Intake Processing Unit that receives complaints from the incarcerated population and the public. Staff in the Intake Processing Unit respond to complaints that the OIG receives through U.S. Postal mail, phone calls (toll-free hotline), and inquiries through our website, which can exceed 1,000 monthly claims. Below are 16 complaints that the Intake Processing Unit reviewed and closed as of February 2025. These cases highlight the OIG’s impact and efforts to resolve the complainant’s concerns.

This report summarizes the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s performance in conducting internal investigations and handling employee discipline cases we monitored and closed from July 1, 2024, through December 31, 2024. Of the 212 cases we monitored and closed in this time period, we rated 44 cases sufficient, 92 sufficient with recommendations, and 76 cases insufficient.

During January 2025, the OIG’s Centralized Screening Monitoring Team monitored and closed 875 grievances. This document presents eight notable cases monitored and closed by the OIG during January 2025.

This report summarizes the OIG’s monitoring of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s staff misconduct investigations and the employee disciplinary processes that arise primarily from grievances incarcerated people file at their assigned institutions. The OIG monitored the performance of the department’s Office of Internal Affairs investigators in conducting investigations; the performance of hiring authorities, including wardens, in handling the employee discipline process for those cases; and the performance of department attorneys who provided legal advice to the investigators and hiring authorities and represented the department in legal proceedings, if any, regarding these cases. In 2024, the OIG monitored and closed 162 staff misconduct cases.

This report summarizes our monitoring of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s Centralized Screening Team, which determines how to classify and route complaints the department receives that contain routine issues or allegations of staff misconduct toward an incarcerated or supervised person. From January 1, 2024, through December 31, 2024, the OIG reviewed and monitored 9,245 complaints to determine whether the Centralized Screening Team identified and routed allegations of staff misconduct to the appropriate entity within the department, either for a full investigation by the Office of Internal Affairs; for investigation by locally designated investigators at the prison or parole office where the misconduct allegedly occurred; or to be handled as a routine matter by prison or parole office staff.

This annual report summarizes the work the Office of the Inspector General completed during 2024, including the 20 public reports we issued. The report also details the work the OIG performed that was not highlighted in other reports issued during the year.

The Office of the Inspector General’s (the OIG) Intake Processing Unit receives complaints from the incarcerated population and the public. To assist with the review of complaints, Intake staff actively work to gain knowledge of local and departmentwide issues through attending periodic meetings with inmate advisory councils (IACs) at California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (the department) prisons. This report presents some of the common issues raised by the IACs regarding departmental processes, along with the OIG’s actions and recommendations pertaining to those issues.

This report contains our assessment of the medical care provided to incarcerated people at Avenal State Prison between April and September 2023. We rated the case review component of the overall health care quality adequate and the compliance component of the overall health care quality inadequate.