California State Prison

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California State Prison, Los Angeles County is a male-only state prison located in the city of Lancaster, in Los Angeles County, California. The only state prison located in the county, it is also referenced as Los Angeles County State Prison, CSP-Los Angeles County. Only occasionally is the prison referred to as Lancaster State Prison, which was particularly avoided in 1992 partly to ease the stigma for Lancaster.FacilitiesAs of Fiscal Year 2006/2007, LAC had a total of 1,519 staff and an annual operating budget of $100 million. As of September 2007, it had a design capacity of 2,300 but a total institution population of 4,976, for an occupancy rate of 216.3 percent.LAC's include the following facilities: Level I housing: Open dormitories without a secure perimeter Level IV housing: Cells, fenced or walled perimeters, electronic security, more staff and armed officers both inside and outside the installation Reception Center (RC): provides short term housing to process, classify and evaluate incoming inmateHistoryBefore the prison opened in 1993, Los Angeles County hosted no prisons but accounted for forty percent of California's state-prison inmates. "Most of Lancaster's civic leaders and residents" opposed the building of the prison, and four inmates escaped from LAC in its first year of operation. Nevertheless, by 2000 city residents' opinions of the prison had improved so much that a proposal to increase the proportion of maximum-security inmates received little criticism.A 2006–2007 conversion "of roughly half of" LAC's facilities decreased the number of maximum security inmates and increased the number of reception center inmates. Since reception center inmates are at the prison for shorter times than maximum security inmates, the conversion may "reduce the number of families that will relocate to the region to be near a family member who is in the prison" and "reduce the number of prisoners who will want to relocate to the area after serving their sentences or after being released on parole".