A Folsom Prison official has been named as the new warden at San Quentin State Prison.

Kevin Chappelle, the chief deputy warden at Folsom State Prison, will step into the top post at the Marin County prison on Jan. 3, state prison officials announced Thursday.

"He's a great leader, well-respected by his staff and by the inmates," said Folsom spokesman Lt. Paul Baker. "San Quentin is lucky to get him."

Chappelle will succeed acting Warden Mike Martel. Martel, who began his career 30 years ago as a correctional officer at San Quentin, was appointed to that position on Feb. 22...

Condemned inmate Brandon Wilson, 33, who was on death row for the murder of a 9-year-old boy, was found hanging in his cell this morning at San Quentin State Prison. Wilson was pronounced dead at 6:47 a.m. He was single-celled.

Wilson was sentenced to death by a San Diego County jury on November 4, 1999, for the November 14, 1998, murder of Matthew Cecchi in an Oceanside park restroom...

San Quentin houses some of the most notorious criminals in the State of California, including those on death row.

Many other inmates regard San Quentin as one of the best facilities in the California Department of Corrections system. Some inmates say they were transferred to San Quentin from other institutions as a reward for their continued good behavior...

Four San Quentin State Prison inmates were seriously injured during a dining hall riot involving nearly 200 convicts Sunday, a prison spokesman said.

The men suffered stab and slash wounds after the massive brawl erupted around 6:50 p.m., spokesman Lt. Sam Robinson said. No staff members were injured in the fight, Robinson said.

Ten inmate-made weapons were discovered after the melee, which lasted for a couple of minutes. Guards stopped the brawl using nonlethal bullets and pepper spray, Robinson said...

Gov. Jerry Brown pulled the plug today on plans to construct a new housing facility for condemned inmates at San Quentin.

Brown said in a statement that he believes it would "be unconscionable to earmark $356 million for a new and improved death row while making severe cuts to education and programs that serve the most vulnerable among us."

That bill would add an estimated $28.5 million general fund costs in annual debt service payments, his office said...

For almost 30 years, Jeff Evans acted as prison guard to some of the world's toughest criminals, but lately he's been holding a different audience captive — the students of Lake Tahoe Community College and Mt. Tallac High School. He hopes sharing his experiences will help young adults be successful, he said.

“It's just my way of giving back to the community,” Evans said.

Evans worked at San Quentin State Prison for 29 years before moving to South Lake Tahoe a year and a half ago. He tended to death row inmates, including Charles Manson and Stanley “Tookie” Williams, the co-founder of the Crips...

The California Department of Corrections & Rehabilitation has appointed Mike Martel the new warden at San Quentin State Prison.

A veteran of the state corrections system has been tapped to take over at San Quentin State Prison, where he started his career 30 years ago.

Mike Martel, 56, became warden at the state's oldest prison on Feb. 22...

San Quentin Acting Warden Vincent Cullen was removed from his post on Friday and will move to a different prison within California.

“As a rule, all wardens are selected and appointed in an ‘acting’ capacity as they undergo a comprehensive evaluation,” Assistant Secretary of Communications Oscar Hidalgo said in an email. “Mr. Cullen was effective at maintaining the sound operation of San Quentin during his time as acting warden, but it was decided that an alternate placement was more appropriate at this time.”

About half of California’s 33 adult facilities are lead by acting wardens...

A San Quentin State Prison death row inmate died Monday of natural causes at a hospital outside the prison, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said this afternoon.

Richard Ray Parson, 67, was received on death row from Sacramento County on Oct. 22, 1996, according to the CDCR.

He was convicted of killing 60-year-old Theresa Schmiedt at a Sacramento apartment complex on Jan. 2, 1994, CDCR spokeswoman Peggy Bengs said...

State officials recently announced a second delay in awarding the construction contract for the  first phase of a controversial project to expand San Quentin’s condemned inmate facility.

The state Legislature in 2003 approved the $220 million expansion project, which would include 1,024 cells. But unforeseen costs meant the proposed project had to be downsized to 768 cells. The project is now estimated to cost roughly $356 million.

The first phase of construction includes demolition, site grading, utilities, housing units and towers. The bidding for the first phase began on Oct. 19. There were nine bids submitted, all of which were below the state’s estimated bid of $189 million, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. The lowest bid was from Roseville-based McCarthy Building Companies Inc., at approximately $126.3 million...

Officials with the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said Wednesday they have delayed awarding a contract for the first phase of the $356 million death row complex at San Quentin State Prison until Feb. 9.

The corrections department has notified the three lowest bidders of its intention "to extend the period of award ... to allow additional time for the department to brief the new administration on various aspects of the project," said Paul Verke, a corrections spokesman.

Marin officials are mounting a desperate last stand to prevent the awarding of the contract and kill the project...

A prison guard doing routine checks found a 70-year-old San Quentin inmate dead in his death row cell early Saturday, prison officials said.

George Hatton Smithey apparently hanged himself with his bed sheets, Lt. Sam Robinson said.

Smithey had been on death row since July 1989 for the 1988 murder and attempted rape of Cheryl Anne Nesler during the commission of an armed robbery and burglary, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement...

People leaving prison face daunting employment prospects, but a new kind of job fair may have boosted some prisoners' chances at a sustainable future.

San Quentin State Prison played host Saturday to about 60 "green" employers, advocate groups and job-training centers, many of them from Alameda County. The idea, organizers said, was to build relationships between employers in need of affordable, enthusiastic labor and those leaving prisons, a group that has been hit particularly hard during the recession.

"We kind of based this on the Van Jones ethic," said organizer Beth Waitkus, who runs the prison's Insight Garden Program. "Everybody should have a chance to succeed in the new green economy." Jones is a former green jobs adviser to President Barack Obama...

The trial of a parolee accused of stabbing a 14-year-old girl at a San Francisco bakery in 2007 gets under way Tuesday in San Francisco Superior Court.

Scott Thomas, now 29, is charged with two counts of attempted murder, one count of aggravated mayhem and one count of assault with a deadly weapon. He has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.

According to police and prosecutors, Thomas, originally from Van Nuys, had been released from San Quentin State Prison the day before the May 19, 2007, stabbing at Creighton's Bakery, near Twin Peaks…

Vincent Cullen takes over as San Quentin State Prison warden on Monday, Jan. 11. The second-in-command at San Quentin State Prison will become first-in-command on Monday.

Vincent Cullen takes over the 157-year-old prison, the state's oldest, after spending a year as chief deputy warden. His annual salary will be $107,493.

"I always wanted to work at San Quentin, but I never honestly believed it would come to fruition," said Cullen, 47, a Vacaville resident who will soon move to the prison grounds. "When I first started out, attaining a warden's job was almost beyond comprehension…"

In a brightly colored classroom in an otherwise dismal place, Stanley Durden studies intently at a desk.

Durden, 51, says he wants to gain what he missed outside San Quentin State Prison - an education.

"I won't learn anything by sitting in the cell or watching TV. I prefer to have school," said Durden, who has served 10 years of a 25-to-life prison sentence for repeated burglary and robbery convictions. He wants to earn his GED…

State Treasurer Bill Lockyer last week pulled back on issuing $590 million in bonds to pay for the reconstruction of San Quentin's crumbling death row.

Lockyer's decision was based on a legal technicality, which means its impact may only be temporary. But anything that would slow down this expensive boondoggle is worthy of commendation.

Credit goes to two legislators, Sen. Mark Leno of San Francisco and Assemblyman Jared Huffman of San Rafael, who've questioned the costly expansion of San Quentin's death row without an adequate examination of alternatives…

A murderer who spent 26 years on death row has died of natural causes, the 70th condemned prisoner to succumb to old age, suicide or murder compared with 13 executed by the state since capital punishment resumed in 1978, the state reported Thursday.

Albert Cecil Howard, 57, died at a hospital near San Quentin State Prison on Wednesday, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said in a statement.

Howard was convicted and sentenced to death a year after the May 25, 1982, murder of 74-year-old Lois Roy Fried of Tulare County…

An outbreak of swine flu at San Quentin State Prison led officials today to limit the acceptance of new inmates from 19 Northern California counties and halt the transfer of prisoners to other correctional facilities.

Nearly half the prison's 5,153 inmates have been placed under quarantine after 47 exhibited flu-like symptoms for the H1N1 virus and four probable cases were identified, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The decisions to limit transfers, keep some prisoners quarantined and stop visits from the public to the affected housing units were approved "in an attempt to minimize the spread of the virus," agency officials said in a statement…

A limited quarantine imposed at San Quentin State Prison last week because of four probable cases of the H1N1 virus, or swine flu, has now been expanded to quarantine 2,100 inmates, a prison health care spokesman said Monday.

The quarantine began last week after four inmates suffering from an out-of-season flu were found to have a 97 percent chance of having the H1N1 virus and 26 others showed potential symptoms of the virus…

San Francisco was a rough-and-tumble Gold Rush boomtown in 1852, when authorities decided they needed more secure facilities to house troublemakers than the prison ships docked in the bay. So they built a prison at Point San Quentin, an out-of-the way peninsula north of the city.

That location made sense 157 years ago; since then, the Marin County neighborhood surrounding it has become one of the most desirable places to live in the state, a high-end suburb of wooded hills and spectacular bay views just a 10-minute drive from the Golden Gate. In the midst of this beauty stands one of the oldest prisons in the country, a maximum-security facility that houses California's death row. San Quentin State Prison is crumbling and overcrowded, and it sits on extraordinarily valuable land. Yet years of efforts to sell the property and build a new death row somewhere else have gotten nowhere…

A San Francisco judge has dismissed a lawsuit against the state for a near-fatal stabbing by a parolee who was mistakenly released from San Quentin State Prison without supervision, a ruling that left the victim's mother frustrated and bewildered.

"There's no recourse for anything that they do regardless of how grossly negligent their behavior is," Linda Schaller said last week in an interview from her San Francisco home, where her 17-year-old daughter, Loren, is still recovering from her wounds in the May 2007 attack…

For Jeanne Woodford, the former warden of San Quentin and former Director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, it wasn't the years of delays in death penalty cases but the experience of actually carrying out executions that shaped her perspective. In October, the L.A. Times published Woodford's reflections:

As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, "Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?" We knew the answer: No…

Robert Ayers, warden of San Quentin State Prison, ended his career Tuesday where he began as a guard in 1968.

Ayers' co-workers credit him with returning stability to administration of the state's oldest prison after a period when wardens there arrived and departed faster than express buses. The heads of nonprofits offering rehabilitative programs at the prison also sing his praises, saying he opened the prison to them in an effort to battle recidivism.

But Ayers' 40-year career, which includes stints as warden at Lancaster State Prison and Pelican Bay State Prison, has also had its rocky moments. In 2000, he was denied permanent appointment as warden to Pelican Bay, where a female guard filed a lawsuit against him and others, claiming they failed to properly discipline inmates who sexually harassed her.

Gov. Pete Wilson nominated Ayers, who is a Republican, for the warden's job at Pelican Bay. But Wilson's successor, Gray Davis, withdrew the nomination. Ayers retired soon after….

Some 71 years after the last hanging of an inmate at Folsom Prison, California's death penalty is fatally flawed, according to a state commission report.

The California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice was established in 2004 in part to determine the extent to which the state's legal system has caused wrongful executions. It reported June 30 that the state must narrow its death penalty, in part because the penalty is impossibly expensive to continue in its current broad form.

Under the statute now in effect, a full 87 percent of California's first-degree murders are "death eligible," and could be prosecuted as death cases, the commission noted. Any of a total of 22 "special circumstances" can be cited by local prosecutors in seeking a death penalty. The list includes drive-by murder. A federal Justice Department study in 2000 found numerous racial and geographic disparities applied to death penalty sentences…

From the moment you walk through the metal doors of what was once San Quentin's gymnasium, all you can see are men and bunk beds. Packed together from front wall to back, more than 360 inmates live here because there's no room anywhere else.

A lone correctional officer, Michael McClain, sits on a riser in the middle of the gym, about 6 feet off the floor. Below, the conversations are loud and tense.

"It can get ugly. It can go at any moment, just at the drop of a hat," he says, watching the floor…

Ramon Salcido, the mass murderer who slit the throats of his own children and left a trail of blood across Sonoma Valley in 1989, was denied a death penalty appeal by the California Supreme Court on June 30. Salcido has been on death row at San Quentin since December 1990, and had appealed his sentence on several grounds, including the allegations that he was illegally extradited from Mexico and that he was high on cocaine and alcohol and suffering a psychotic break during the time of the killings.

Salcido went on a murderous rampage April 18, 1989, after allegedly learning he was not the biological father of one of his wife's four children. He murdered his wife, Angela Richards Salcido, 24, at their Boyes Hot Springs home after taking his three daughters, aged 4, 3, and 22 months, driving to the dump transfer station on Stage Gulch Road, slitting their throats and tossing them into a ditch. The 3-year-old, Carmina, miraculously survived. Salcido also killed his mother-in-law Marian Richards, two sisters-in-law whom he also raped, and Tracy Toovey, an assistant winemaker at Grand Cru Winery in Glen Ellen where the killer worked as a fork-lift operator. There he also shot and wounded Kenneth Butti, his supervisor at Grand Cru…

Ground has not yet been broken on a new death row proposed at San Quentin State Prison, but the projected cost of the project has soared by nearly 80% for a compound that could be full only three years after it opens, according to a critical audit released Tuesday.

If the facility is built as now envisioned, some condemned inmates would have to reside in cells with others rather than be imprisoned separately as they are now, State Auditor Elaine M. Howle reported.

Howle's audit details the delays and changes to the $220-million plan that state lawmakers authorized five years ago to house 656 male inmates facing the death penalty. Those prisoners are now scattered across several antiquated, rundown buildings without modern security feature…

Paroled out of San Quentin at 8 a.m. Saturday, Ronald Eugene Williams hopped two buses and by 4:45 p.m. had rolled into the Greyhound-Amtrak station in Old Town Roseville.

From there, the nine-time convicted felon got a ride to an Auburn halfway house for drug addicts and alcoholics that he will call home for the next six months.

On Monday, he checked in with his new parole agent and shocked her world…