Nearly 3,000 inmates in the Riverside County State Correctional Institution of California’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation plan to close in the fall of 2026, continuing a wave of recent prison closures. Announced on Monday.
The department said the state’s reduced prison population and millions of dollars in cost savings are incentives for the shutdown.
NORCO Prison is a Level 2 Middle Security Correctional Institution that holds 2,766 inmates with felony crimes. The department said about 1,200 workers work for the prison.
Due to the closure, prisoners are not expected to be released early and will be transferred to existing facilities. CDCR says.
The department notes that it will attempt to transfer staff at the facility to other locations in other states and to other jobs across the state. However, it did not say in the release that it would lay off employees.
The correction spokesperson’s phone call did not return immediately.
The state is expected to save $150 million a year due to the closure.
Will Matthews, a spokesman for Californian Californian, a nonprofit victim advocacy group for sex crimes, said he hopes the state can transfer some of that savings to “building security at the community level.”
“If you look at the decline in crime over the past decade, it’s an effort between efforts and efforts to reduce crime programs and help prevent injuries,” Matthews said. “This includes housing support programs, medication treatments and job training, which has worked.”
According to a July report from the Los Angeles Police Department, the city of homicide is expected to reach its lowest level in 60 years. The murders in Los Angeles County were also killed.
All saws fell from 2023 to 2024, according to statewide, including arson crimes (5.8%), theft (13.9%), assaults (1.8%) and automatic theft (15.5%). Juvenile and Criminal Justice Center.
The decline in crime rates is equivalent to a smaller prison population, CDCR said.
The department noted that the inmate population of its 30 prisons is about 91,000, which is half of the 173,000 people imprisoned in 2006.
Matthews said that due to the passage of criminal justice reform measures, such as Proposition 57 of 2016, this was partially promoted, which allows parole for people convicted of nonviolent felony.
The CDCR pointed to other reforms, such as Bill 109, which transfers some prison populations from states to county facilities, and also helps reduce the population of prisoners.
“We praise Gavin Newsom and Governor CDCR for their historicity and continue to commit to keeping California away from systems beyond security,” Tinisch Hollins, executive director of Californian Security and Justice, said in a statement.
Norco’s closure continues the recent trend of closures of correctional institutions, which were closed in 2021 in Tracy, Susanville in 2023 and Blythe this year. In total, CDCR said it had recently shut down 11 facilities and two other facilities, as well as 42 housing in 11 prisons.
The future of Norco’s facilities (once a resort) remains a mystery.
CDCR said it will implement a “warm shutdown” process that will keep the property reused or sold.
The Norco City Council did not comment on the closure of the facility and said it was uncertain how the closure would affect the community.
“The state will support affected local communities and workforce through economic resilience programs,” the CDCR said at the release, but did not provide details.
One of the priorities of the legislative platform adopted by the City Council is to advocate for adaptive reuse of former Noconia hotels and resorts.
“The City of Noco still hopes that one day this historic gem will be restored to its former resort and will become a regional economic driver,” the city council wrote in a statement to the Times.
The Correctional Institution, which originally opened in 1928, is a luxury hotel in Lake Noconia Club.
It was reshaped into a naval hospital during World War II, and then the federal government donated the medical building as a narcotics center in 1962. In the 1980s, it was in its current form as a correctional facility.
