Rison Closing News Today

The Willard Correctional Institution officially closed its doors Saturday, according to an announcement from Gov. Ned Lamont. 

It was 1981 and then-Gov. Jerry Brown had a problem. California’s 12 prisons were bulging at the seams with more than 28,000 inmates, thanks largely to tougher sentencing laws he signed, and he was told to expect another 20,000 more inmates within a few years. The state hadn’t built a new prison in two decades, stretching back to when Brown’s father, Pat Brown, was governor. The Department of Corrections, as the prison system was then called, wanted Brown to launch a major prison...