On Wednesday, Oct. 14, Mark Faucette, vice president of the Amity Foundation, a nonprofit substance-abuse-treatment provider, will be at Donovan State Prison in Otay Mesa, saying goodbye to the roughly 500 inmates currently enrolled in Amity's Right Turn program. The highly regarded program, held up as a national model for effective prisoner rehabilitation, is being closed down, a casualty of state budget cuts.

Last week, Elias Contreras, the prison's associate warden, told a KPBS reporter that Right Turn would be replaced with a 90-day detox program. That's actually not the case: California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation spokesperson Peggy Bengs confirmed for CityBeat on Tuesday that Donovan is one of eight prisons statewide that won't provide any sort of professional in-custody substance-abuse treatment. Rather, those facilities will rely entirely on outside volunteers from programs like Narcotics Anonymous and inmates who've been trained as substance-abuse counselors…

Authorities are still searching today for a minimum-security inmate who escaped the Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in Otay Mesa on Sunday.

Manuel Casillas, a 24-year-old inmate serving time for a second-degree burglary conviction, was last seen at Sunday's 6 p.m. inmate count, according to prison officials. Corrections officers discovered him missing at 9:30 p.m. during another inmate count, according to officials.

Casillas was sentenced to the male prison on June 20, 2006 and scheduled to be paroled Oct. 25, according to officials. The prison houses about 4,700 minimum, medium and maximum security inmates…

A convict serving a life term at Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility attacked a guard with a makeshift knife Tuesday, leaving him with non-lethal wounds and prompting a lockdown at the prison.

The inmate assaulted the officer with an altered disposable razor as the victim was beginning his shift and approaching his work area about 8 a.m., said Lt. Michael Stout, a spokesman for the Otay Mesa-area state penitentiary.

"The officer was able to defend himself, preventing additional injuries, until responding staff arrived to gain control of the inmate," Stout said…

Prison overcrowding is forcing the state corrections department to take a new look at rehabilitation of inmates. Now, a pilot program in Otay Mesa offers inmates a chance to get out of prison, and never go back.

Forty-year-old Brian Williams is learning how to repair computer and cable television networks while serving a 16-month sentence at Donovan State Prison in Otay Mesa.

"I could have come to prison and learned to become a better criminal, or through this program learn a skill to be gainfully employed with a new career," Williams said…