Inspectors sent to check on California prison kitchens found rotten tomatoes, moldy peppers, spiderwebs and bug-covered fly traps at Corcoran, and moldy ceilings at Corcoran and California State Prison, Sacramento, along with equipment failures and missing utensils serious enough to raise security concerns. The findings come from an audit by the state's Office of the Inspector General, which examined food programs and services inside California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation facilities.
The audit, which The Sacramento Bee reported on, covered four prisons visited over several months: California State Prison, Sacramento, in September and October 2025; California State Prison, Corcoran, and the Central California Women's Facility in October 2025; and Richard J. Donovan Correctional Facility in December 2025. Inspector General Amarik Singh said auditors found sanitation deficiencies and equipment that failed to properly sanitize food trays and utensils, according to the Bee's reporting. “Our observations found several deficiencies at three of the prisons we reviewed,” the report states.
Rotten Produce and Moldy Ceilings
At Corcoran, auditors documented rotten tomatoes and moldy peppers, which the report tied to weak scheduling practices for discarding spoiled food before it piled up. The same kitchen had moldy ceilings, spiderwebs and fly traps covered in bugs, the Bee reports. Moldy ceilings also turned up as a concern at California State Prison, Sacramento.
One facility stood apart from the rest. The Central California Women's Facility had fewer deficiencies than the other three prisons audited, and Singh pointed to it as a model, calling it an example of how a kitchen in a prison setting should be maintained, per the Bee's account. The women's facility also houses Growing Justice, a program built around a vertical farm of stacked growing systems used to grow crops on-site, according to Oaklandside.
A Missing Wire Whip Raises Security Flags
Beyond sanitation, the audit flagged gaps in how kitchens track utensils. All four facilities were missing at least some daily logs for kitchen utensils used by incarcerated workers, the report found. Under normal procedure, incarcerated people using utensils are required to check them out from an officer when removing them from a locked room.
That system broke down in at least one instance auditors flagged as concerning: a wire whip and cube steak cutters went missing for several days. The OIG report warned that an incarcerated person could have manipulated the wire whip into a weapon, a detail that underscores why utensil tracking is treated as a security issue and not just a kitchen-management one.
State corrections officials told the Bee the department is developing a department-wide corrective action strategy meant to strengthen both food safety and equipment oversight across its prison system.
A National Pattern Behind the Local Findings
The California findings land inside a broader, well-documented problem with prison food nationally. Aishatu Yusuf, vice president of innovation programs at Impact Justice, said incarcerated people often lack access to healthy, adequate and safe food. Yusuf cited a national survey in which 75% of formerly incarcerated people reported being served moldy or rotten food while locked up — a figure that matches Impact Justice's own published research, which also found that 94% of survey respondents could not eat enough in prison to feel full.
The pattern shows up outside California too. PennLive reported that incarcerated people experience food-borne illness outbreaks roughly seven times more often than the general public, and that Pennsylvania jails and prisons serve more than a million meals a week while remaining exempt from routine restaurant inspections. A 2023 inspection at Dauphin County Prison there turned up more than 10 dead cockroaches in the dishwasher area along with meat and fruit stored on the floor, the outlet found. In Texas, a Prison Journalism Project account described food trays at the Mark Stiles Unit as dirty, with one writer saying trays on one side of the facility were sometimes dipped briefly into a trash can full of soapy water rather than run through a dishwasher.
Programs Aimed at Fixing the Problem
Yusuf said CDCR uses programs such as Harvest of the Month to bring fresh produce into correctional facilities. That program, run through Impact Justice, has delivered more than 600,000 pounds of fresh produce to about 90,000 incarcerated people since 2023, per Oaklandside's reporting. Impact Justice's Growing Justice initiative goes further, building vertical farms inside women's prisons in California and South Carolina to produce leafy greens while training incarcerated women in indoor farming.
Those efforts sit alongside, rather than resolve, the deficiencies the inspector general's audit uncovered during inspections from September through December 2025. For now, the corrective action strategy state officials described to the Bee remains in development.
