By William Melhado
The Sacramento Bee
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — One windy January afternoon Katie Jackson stood on the West Steps of the Capitol as she described how a man locked up in a California prison managed to break into a control room where she was working as a correctional officer, rape her and hold her hostage for several hours.
Announcing a lawsuit against her employer, Jackson said the reason for the attack at the Sierra Conservation Center was due, in part, to a new system-wide change to state prisons.
“We have to work around certain rules and policies of the California Model in order to do our job,” Jackson said. “It makes our job harder to keep each other safe.”
She said the new freedoms the Scandinavian-inspired California Model awarded the incarcerated population created more dangerous situations for correctional staff, which led to the horrific attack against her. Jackson’s experience struck a nerve with some correctional staff across the state who have seen their workplaces become less safe in recent years.
Those at the top are well aware of staff’s opposition to the changes.
Officials at the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said the characterization that staff are more at risk due to the rehabilitative push is inaccurate. But, CDCR Secretary Jeff Macomber, noted “we have not done a great job of communicating our message.”
In 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom and other state leaders unveiled the California Model as a system-wide shift toward rehabilitation. The goal of the program is to apply national and international best practices to make prisons safer and healthier for the incarcerated population and staff who work there.
The actual policy changes related to the California Model, the secretary said, are limited to adapting training courses and working to make staff more aware of the mental and emotional consequences of trauma on staff and incarcerated people. Macomber was adamant that no policies around security have been changed as a result of the California Model. (The department did not comment on Jackson’s specific case.)
Interviews with over a dozen current and former correctional staff indicate officers believe otherwise. Many said the progressive-sounding program is being pushed by indifferent state leaders and is creating lackadaisical security conditions in already dangerous work environments.
Whether a recent increase in violence in the state’s prisons is a result of the California Model is besides the point, said a lieutenant who trains correctional staff and who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect his job. The impression that officers have fewer ways to hold the incarcerated population accountable has made some staff resentful of the program, he said.
“Sometimes perception is reality,” he said. “With a lot of people, that’s kind of unfortunately the world we’re at right now.”
What is the California Model?
In recent years, state prison leaders and correctional union officials have taken trips to Norway to learn about other incarceration methods. They took inspiration from the campus-like facilities where inmates cooked their own food, wore their own clothes and slept in single-person rooms.
Norway’s overhauling of its prison system helped the country reach a recidivism rate of roughly 20%. Former inmates in California reenter the criminal justice system at nearly twice that rate.
Under the Scandinavian model, prisons also become less stressful work environments, which can lead to better long-term health outcomes for guards and people living in prison.
The job of working in a prison comes with serious mental and physical health risks. One-third of officers reported at least one symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder, according to a 2017 survey of California correctional staff. One in seven retired officers have thought about killing themselves.
“The CA Model is not going to stop all our bad days or violence within our system, but it will hopefully reduce the number of bad days and violence our staff experience now,” reads a magazine published by CDCR last summer.
CDCR outlines the California Model as four pillars. One of those components is “dynamic security,” an approach that aims to build positive relationships between staff and the incarcerated. Another is turning the department into an organization that recognizes the harm of trauma the incarcerated population has experienced and attempts to help people recover from those negative past experiences.
Newsom announced the initiative just over two years ago, beginning with the transformation of the notorious San Quentin State Prison, previously the country’s largest death row facility, into a rehabilitation center based on Scandinavian principles.
Even though the department has rolled out some elements of the California Model in all facilities, some prisons are further along in the process than others. Eight prisons, of the state’s 31 adult institutions, are in the first phase of what will eventually be a system-wide change.
One of those is Salinas Valley State Prison, a sprawling facility that houses roughly 2,400 men, many of whom are maximum- and high-security inmates. Drab gray buildings dot the vast campus which is framed by verdant mountains of the Central Coast on both sides of the valley. Looking east at one of the facilities, bright murals stretch halfway up the buildings, depicting a military scene and video game characters.
The murals, designed and painted by incarcerated artists, extend inside one of the housing units where incarcerated artist Isaac Sandoval has covered most of the walls of the 200-person housing unit with meticulous portraits of characters from the DC and Marvel comic book universes.
Sandoval stood in front of one of his first murals, an angry green Hulk prying his way through a brick wall. He said he painted superheroes and their respective villains on opposite walls of the unit. Batman faces the Joker: a commentary on good and evil, Sandoval said.
“Most nights I paint and when I go back to my cell I feel so relaxed,” said Dale Bretches, another incarcerated artist.
The murals are part of the prison’s larger effort to make facilities more humane and the environment calmer. Normalization efforts like these, is another core pillar of the California Model.
The murals also are part of a broader beautification effort, with the intention of improving employee wellness, said Kelly Santoro , the acting warden of Salinas Valley.
As another aid to employee health, the prison recently recruited Anna, a 3-year-old golden labrador with boundless energy, to work as a sort of therapy dog for staff. Anna also makes hospital visits when staff get hurt. The wiggly service dog has helped “lower the temperature of the environment,” Santoro said, decreasing staff anxiety with it.
During a recent visit to to the prison, how volatile a workplace prisons can be was clear. Shortly after a reporter and visual journalist left the housing unit B Ward, a fight broke out between several incarcerated men in front of the outdoor murals. Officers responded immediately, but the heightened anxiety from the fight was palpable.
Perhaps the prison’s most tangible product of the California Model is the Salinas Valley Resource Team. This small group of correctional staff, working with mental health professionals, meets with high-risk inmates to build positive relationships with the men and help support their rehabilitation.
Officers with the resource team, some of whom were skeptics at first, say it’s working to reduce violence.
“It makes everything run a lot smoother,” said the resource team supervisor Lt. Joel Gomez.
Time to talk, understand
In the resource team’s headquarters, comfy armchairs and a ping pong table contrast sharply with the heavy metal doors and sanitized surfaces of the unit that houses men who are part of the prison’s Psychiatric Inpatient Program. Here, in a closet-turned-lounge, the resource team holds sessions with those with mental disorders, some of the most high-risk men in the prison.
The goal of these sessions is to get the incarcerated men to “see us as people and not just a badge,” Gomez said.
On a recent Thursday morning, Officer Ricardo Garcia scrolled through an inmate’s mental health history, displayed on a flat-screen TV in preparation for an upcoming session. As part of the team’s risk assessment, Garcia reminded his colleagues of the man’s crimes: one conviction of first degree murder and two attempted murders, for which he is serving a life sentence.
Minutes later, Garcia and Officer Edgar Martinez sat a table with this man, dividing domino tiles among each other. As they played several rounds, Martinez teased his domino partner about avoiding the yard because of the rain. The man returned the banter when he won a game against the two officers.
As the three men played, Sgt. Danny Delgadillo described how unnatural the scene was when he initially joined the resource team.
On the regular beat, Delgadillo described his thinking as: “distance equals safety.”
But playing dominoes or lounging on the couch, the staff and incarcerated men are close. They’re more than just physically close. During the sessions, officers learn about the men’s lives prior to prison, Delgadillo said, and the circumstances that led them here.
Knowing what can trigger these sometimes volatile men can help de-escalate situations, which has an immediate benefit to everyone on the unit, he said.
Despite the successes Delgadillo and his colleagues see, “it’s not a popular job,” said Lenard Pennisi , a captain with the resource team with over two decades of experience with CDCR. The program is controversial among correctional staff, but he attributes that to a lack of understanding about the work the resource team is doing.
Changing people’s minds is hard. As Gomez put it: The biggest challenge is our own peers.
‘This big umbrella thing’
Hector Bravo Ferrel is perhaps the most vocal and visible critic of the California Model.
A former CDCR lieutenant, Ferrel posts videos to YouTube under the moniker “That Prison Guard,” some of which are extremely critical of Macomber, the CDCR secretary, and California’s correctional system. On the subject of the California Model, Ferrel is apoplectic about the damage being wrecked on the staff working inside of state prisons.
“You have these brand, spanking new, inexperienced officers being led to the slaughter,” Ferrel said in an interview. “Security measures are non-existent.”
Fennel’s critiques of the program, which have garnered thousands of internet views, are closely aligned with those of some veteran officers who believe their jobs should exclusively focus on corrections, not rehabilitation. These critics have pointed to the attack at the Sierra Conservation Center and other recent violent incidents as proof of the California Model’s failures.
The exclusive focus on corrections contrasts with the department’s stated mission of rehabilitating incarcerated people. (Macomber remembered similar pushback when the department added “Rehabilitation” to its acronym in 2004.)
Another branch of critics believe rehabilitation should be both a necessary and urgent goal of the state’s prison system, but they don’t believe the California Model is achieving that objective.
A lieutenant who spoke anonymously said that pressure from the top levels to adopt the California Model has created a more permissive environment in prisons, where the disciplinary process has been watered down. He said when an officer is battered, their partners blame the California Model.
“It’s probably not the result of anything California Model-related, but it’s just because the people believe that’s the case,” he said.
CDCR data on incidents, use of force, and battery against officers and inmates have steadily increased from 2021 to 2025, according to reports published by the department. Just last month, 11 facilities, including Salinas Valley, were placed on a sort of lockdown due to a surge in violence against staff and within the incarcerated population.
Macomber acknowledged the increase in violence in California prisons in recent years. A changing prison dynamic, with higher rates of mental health issues among California’s incarcerated, and overcrowding in facilities due to prison and housing unit closures, were two driving forces of the violence, he noted.
Some correctional staff agreed the California Model wasn’t the cause of the increase in violence, but the two are certainly correlated.
“It’s hard to buy into because the California model has become this big umbrella thing that is reducing the fact that we as correction officers still have a job” to do, said a correctional officer with more than 23 years of experience, who spoke anonymously to avoid retaliation.
While the majority of people that pass through prison can be rehabilitated, the officer said, some will never be able to return to society.
“It’s taking away the safety protocols to deal with them because everybody’s being treated as if they can be restored,” she said.
The breadth of what falls under the California Model, and what doesn’t, is another source of confusion.
“The California Model is not very well defined,” said Caitlin O’Neil, a policy analyst with the Legislative Analyst’s Office who specializes in state prisons.
She said the boundaries of what the term encompasses can be subjective, particularly when it comes to how staff interpret the guiding principles and culture. Absent specificity, it’s difficult to nail down outcomes — and any potential unintended consequences — from the California Model, she said.
To avoid what the department says is an incorrect association between the push for rehabilitation and increases in violence, O’Neil said the department should make it clear what policies, practices and culture changes fall under the California Model.
As it stands, the department is facing a mountain of opposition.
“No matter what the prison tries to do to implement the California Model, there’s so much pushback from the staff,” one lieutenant said. “I don’t know if anything at this point would be successful.”
An inopportune time for change
“As we rolled this out, we couldn’t have picked a worse time,” Macomber said.
The unveiling of the California Model came shortly after a dramatic drop in prison populations. The state had released some inmates to prevent the spread of COVID-19, which partially prompted the closure of four prisons.
Additionally, Macomber said staff feel like “they’re always under the microscope,” because of changes to the system the incarcerated population uses to make complaints against officers.
Staff think the California Model is responsible for that heightened scrutiny, but it really had nothing to do with that, Macomber said. Instead, a decades-old lawsuit related to incarcerated people with disabilities prompted the change in policy.
The department has also recently changed when correctional staff can use solitary confinement. In 2022, Newsom directed CDCR to limit the use of solitary confinement in a veto message for legislation that attempted to reform when prisoners can be isolated from their peers. The department said the reform was not part of the California Model.
“There’s a lot of things that have happened over the last few years that staff see as negative, and I don’t disagree with them,” Macomber said.
Asked about the increase in use of force and battery, the secretary wanted to know exactly what elements of the California Model staff blamed for the violence.
“What do they feel has changed? Security protocols? Corrections 101?” Macomber asked. He said the safety of staff, community and the prison population remains the department’s number one mission.
The increase in California prisons’ homicide rate last year, Macomber said, was due to gang activity. If there was a magic solution to prevent prison gangs from killing each other, the department would have implemented it years ago, he said.
The union that represents correctional officers acknowledged staff are skeptical of the program but that it supports the core goals of the California Model.
“CCPOA does not exist to protect the status quo,” union president Neil Flood said in a statement, referring to the labor group.
Flood said that with the right staffing, accountability, training, and protection, the California Model can improve the health and safety of correctional officers.
Macomber also noted that the effort is still in the early stages. He predicted it would take several decades for the department to fully implement the program across the state.
Over 30 years ago, when Macomber started as a correctional officer, he said he would have also been a naysayer. He hopes officers will keep an open mind as they learn more about the program and witness the positive developments from the changes and the work of the resource teams.
“I think the staff’s opinion will start changing over time,” he said.
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