One CA prison set to close, another gets artwork

From CalMatters deputy editor Adam Ashton:

Gov. Gavin Newsom shouldn’t expect much pushback from the next city in line to lose a state prison. 

Norco in Riverside County for years has been lobbying to close the California Rehabilitation Center, arguing the city can find a better use for the site. It was an art deco hotel before it was a state prison.

Now, the prison is on track to close in 2026. Newsom’s corrections department said on Tuesday that the prison is no longer needed because of the state’s falling incarcerated population. 

It’ll be the fifth to close during Newsom’s administration.

Other prison cities fought the closures by suing the state or lobbying to hold on to the jobs.

Not Norco. It posted a statement on social media saying officials look forward to the “adaptive reuse” of the former hotel.

About 1,200 people work at the prison. They won’t necessarily be laid off when the prison closes because some will be able to transfer to other sites.

More on California prisons: An effort to display a large-scale piece of artwork inside the walls of California’s once infamous prison brings hope and a sense of community to an often overlooked population, reports CalMatters’ Joe Garcia.

In 2023 Newsom unveiled a multimillion-dollar plan to reorganize and rebrand the state’s oldest prison into a facility focused on rehabilitation. Renamed the San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, the plan included new educational buildings and turning the former Death Row housing unit into living quarters for the general prison population.

But these changes did little to address the dull exteriors that still signified confinement to its inhabitants, writes Joe. Joe worked with Kai Bannon, an incarcerated person and co-founder of the nonprofit San Quentin SkunkWorks, to help commission and raise money for a mural for the facility, which was completed in July.

Read more here.

About 2,300 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children are poised to lose their health care coverage by Aug. 31 — a change that could potentially destabilize the insurance marketplace, writes CalMatters’ Ana B. Ibarra. 

Since the 2015 inception of the Affordable Care Act, immigrants living in the country illegally have been barred from buying health coverage through state- and federally-run marketplaces. But last year under the Biden administration, recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), who are allowed to stay in the U.S. and legally work, were permitted to buy insurance through the marketplaces.

President Donald Trump’s administration reversed this policy in June, however, in an effort to “stabilize the risk pool, lower premiums, and reduce improper enrollments.” But experts say the reversal risks doing the opposite: Because most DACA recipients are ages 35 and younger, eliminating them from the pool means they can’t help offset the costs of covering more expensive individuals who are sicker and older.

Read more here.

From CalMatters higher education and workforce reporter Adam Echelman:

Community students at Cañada College in Silicon Valley can earn back all the money they spent on school in a matter of weeks. Nearby, at Laney College in Oakland, it takes the typical student over six years to recoup the costs of college. 

This analysis, released today by the College Futures Foundation and the HEA Group, shows the return on investment of over 300 institutions in California offering associate degrees and professional certificates. The analysis looks at the average wages of graduates at each school and the cost of tuition, minus any grants or scholarships. Researchers compared those numbers with the amount of money that students would have earned if they only had a high school degree.

The Bay Area had a high concentration of schools that delivered a quick return on investment. Other regions had numerous schools, especially private and for-profit schools, that took students over 10 years to recoup the costs of college. Some schools yielded no return on investment, ever. 

In 2023, the Biden administration passed a new set of rules requiring colleges to demonstrate that their graduates earned more than someone with only a high school degree. In the federal budget passed this summer, the Trump administration will impose its own requirements starting next year.

The state Legislature has approved a bill that would pay California incarcerated firefighters $7.25 an hour during active fires starting next year. CalMatters’ Cayla Mihalovich and video strategy director Robert Meeks have a video segment on this historic shift in pay as part of our partnership with PBS SoCal. Watch it here.

SoCalMatters airs at 5:58 p.m. weekdays on PBS SoCal.