California Investigates Attack by Guards at Scandal-Plagued Women’s Prison

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) has opened an internal affairs investigation into an Aug. 2 use-of-force incident at the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF), a CDCR spokesperson told The Appeal. 

During a contraband search, correctional officers locked more than 100 women in a prison cafeteria without air-conditioning for several hours. When they asked for food, medication, and explanations, staff responded with chemical spray and physical violence. According to multiple witnesses, guards continued to bombard them with chemical spray and pepper bombs even after they were zip-tied and on the ground. Three women were sent to the hospital.

CCWF, located in Chowchilla in the heart of California’s Central Valley, is the United States’ second-largest women’s prison. The facility has faced dozens of lawsuits alleging sexual assault by prison staff, and in 2023 the Madera County District Attorney charged a former guard with nearly 100 counts of sexual abuse. On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a civil rights investigation into sexual misconduct at CCWF and the California Institution for Women.

Large-scale physical violence, like the attack last month, is far less common. The Appeal spoke with over a dozen currently or formerly incarcerated women, including those who had been imprisoned at CCWF since the 1990s; none had ever witnessed or experienced staff brutality of that magnitude. They now demand that CDCR discipline staff involved in events that day, provide medical and mental health care access, and issue confiscation slips, which would help them get back or be reimbursed for lost and destroyed belongings. 

“The safety and well-being of the incarcerated individuals living at California institutions is of the utmost importance. Any accusations of wrongdoing are taken seriously and thoroughly investigated,” a CDCR spokesperson wrote in an email to The Appeal. “CDCR has identified concerning information about the handling of the Aug. 2 incident … and is taking swift action.”

“Shooting Fish in a Bucket”

Donyette Clark, 37, has experienced many searches during her 14 years at CCWF. Staff frequently search for contraband, ranging from extra pillows and altered clothes to cell phones, makeshift weapons, and homemade alcohol. 

But on the morning of Aug. 2, when officers ordered her and her roommates out of their cell, she realized this was no routine search. She and the other women from housing unit 513 waited in the cafeteria as staff overturned their rooms. 

Nearly three hours later, they were still waiting in the sweltering, crowded dining area. The temperature outside was over 90 degrees, and the prison’s evaporative coolers, or swamp coolers, failed to control the heat. The month before, Adrienne Boulware, 47, died during a week when temperatures exceeded 100 degrees. Many were still grieving her death when guards herded them into the chow hall that morning.

No one had been fed. No one had received their morning medications and, with noon approaching, several women asked to speak with the sergeant about getting lunches and medications. 

At the same time, women saw officers carting away bins filled with clothes, shoes, appliances, and other personal property. Officers said they were enforcing the prison policy limiting each person’s possessions to six cubic feet. 

However, prison rules dictate that people can mail excess items home, donate them, or challenge their confiscation via the prison’s grievance process. Those in the cafeteria protested the confiscations and demanded to speak with the sergeant. 

“Everybody was getting frustrated and complaining loudly,” JM, another woman on the unit, who asked to be identified by her initials to lessen the risks of retaliation, told The Appeal. But, she added, no one was aggressive or threatening.

According to JM and Clark, that’s when Sergeant Fernando Arroyo entered with a squad of officers who surrounded the women. 

At first, the sight didn’t frighten Clark.

“As long as we’re not fighting, threatening them or advancing, they can’t use force on us,” she reassured the younger women. No sooner were the words out of her mouth than officers began spraying them and throwing bombs filled with oleoresin capsicum (OC), or pepper spray.

Women attempted to flee to the back of the chow hall. Some tried to cover their faces with their shirts. A handful threw their state-issued plastic cups—the only items they had been allowed to bring—at the officers. 

“They let out a round of spray that looked like a river of orange,” said Christina Wind, 39.

Staff ordered them to lie flat on the floor. Even then, multiple women said that officers continued to spray them and lob OC bombs at them, causing even more chaos and panic. Those on the ground were stepped on by those trying to escape.

Women in unit 513 told The Appeal that guards continued their attack even as several women began exhibiting medical emergencies. Catrina Cameron, 36, has asthma and wears a pacemaker. She told officers that she had chest pains. In response, she said, they sprayed her in the eye and slammed her onto the floor.

Wind told The Appeal that she saw Cameron on the floor and attempted to pick her up. Unable to clearly see, Wind pulled a sergeant off her partner. In response, officers beat her. “I was hit in the head and went down,” she said. She was unable to open her eyes while being hit, zip-tied, and dragged out in a wheelchair. According to Cameron and others who saw her before guards took her away, Wind was frothing at the mouth and vomiting; the left side of her face was sagging. 

Then, staff placed the rest of the women in zip ties and herded them into the yard. There, multiple women, including those who could see the yard from their cell windows, said officers continued to spray them. 

The 90-degree sun made them feel as if their sprayed skin were on fire.

“A lot of people were crying, throwing up,” JM recalled. Even as they lay on the ground, she said that officers continued to spray and throw bombs at them. “They rounded us up like they were shooting fish in a bucket,” she described.

CDCR regulations only permit the uncontrolled use of chemical agents when necessary due to an imminent threat. None of the witnesses who spoke to The Appeal described any threats to the guards’ safety by the women zip-tied in the yard. 

Clark remembers nothing after the first rounds of spray in the chow hall. Her next memory is of waking in an ambulance. EMTs told her that she had had a seizure and passed out. 

“I’ve never had a seizure in my life,” Clark said. Three women, including Clark, were sent to the hospital that day.

“There’s Gonna Be Repercussions”

That weekend, a prison lieutenant approached JM’s cell and asked her to sign what’s known as a non-enemy chrono, or paperwork that states that she has no concerns about her safety from anyone in the prison. Signing it would indicate that JM absolved staff of their actions that Friday. But not signing it would have resulted in solitary confinement under the pretext that JM needed protection from enemies.

“Making allegations implies that there’s gonna be repercussions,” JM told The Appeal. Those repercussions could likely include further staff violence.

SH, 27, was also asked to sign a non-enemy chrono. She had told a nurse that the bruises on her back were from staff throwing a bomb at her while she was on the ground. That weekend, correctional officers called her into a program office where a sergeant and a lieutenant questioned her about her statement, then asked her to sign a non-enemy chrono stating that staff had not used force against her.

SH, who was scheduled to go to a reentry program in a few months, worried that she would face retaliation if she refused to sign the paper. Staff told her they would return her to her room if she signed the paper. They never told her she could refuse to sign. She signed.

Less than two weeks later, she was issued a disciplinary citation, or 115, for obstructing a peace officer. “I signed this paper trying to avoid all this and not get retaliated against, and then it still affects [me],” she told The Appeal.

Now SH doesn’t know if she’ll be allowed to go to the reentry program. If not, she will spend another two years in prison.

“A Higher Standard”

The women of unit 513 spent the next five days locked in their cells. Prison staff brought them meals and medications. Once a day, even though temperatures soared above 100 degrees that week, officers allowed them to fill a cup or water bottle with drinking water from the day room. Otherwise, they had to rely on bottled water previously bought from the commissary.

On Wednesday, Aug. 7, staff let them off lockdown. Prison staff offered mental health counseling—but in a cruel twist, the women had to enter the cafeteria to meet with clinicians.

“It triggered my anxiety,” Clark recalled. She initially refused. Then, she saw officers form a line similar to what they had done the previous Friday. She convinced others to enter the cafeteria if only to avoid more violence. There, a clinician told her that, because of a staffing shortage, mental health professionals could only see her once a week. The following week, her appointment was canceled; she was told that mental health staff were overwhelmed by the high demand for counseling after the attack.

Prison staff initially charged Wind with battery and placed her in segregation for 11 days. When she returned to her cell, the left side of her face was still drooping, leading her and her cellmates to believe that the beating triggered a mini-stroke. But aside from a pain medication injection and an x-ray revealing internal bruising, she has not received deeper medical attention.

On Monday, Aug. 19, formerly incarcerated women rallied outside the prison to protest their peers’ brutal treatment and to demand medical and mental health services, an independent investigation into staff’s use of force, and the officers’ removal during the inquiry. They also demanded that prison officials replace the failing swamp coolers with air conditioning and provide access to cool drinking water, electric fans, and cooling rags during the sweltering summers.

Inside the prison, women refused their meal trays that morning in a show of solidarity.

Two days later, the warden called a mass meeting for the women of 513. According to those who attended, she stated that she could not speak about the Aug. 2 event because it was under investigation. They also said that the warden did not apologize for or even acknowledge the violence that transpired. “It’s really upsetting but always expected,” said Wind.

CDCR declined to answer specific questions sent by The Appeal over email, but a CDCR spokesperson said that CDCR’s Office of Internal Affairs is investigating the incident. The spokesperson also said that the prison began “immediate week-long intensive training on appropriate incident response” and “redirected” some staff members involved. An anonymous video supporting the guards claimed that CDCR transferred several officers, including Sgt. Arroyo, to other prisons after the incident. However, several women told The Appeal that they saw him in the weeks after. Citing the ongoing investigation, CDCR declined to verify whether staff had moved to other prisons.

The women want the employees who participated in that day removed from the institution altogether and held accountable for their actions. Women have told The Appeal that they have seen Arroyo and others on their unit multiple times since that smoke-filled afternoon; each encounter brings back fears and anxieties from that day. “It’s like you’re raped and you have to look at your rapist every day,” Cameron said.

“I have a life without parole sentence because I didn’t stand up and do the right thing when someone else was doing something wrong,” said JM. “But these officers are held to a higher standard. Any one of them could have said, ‘Hey, wait, this is wrong. This is too much.’ And no one spoke up.”