SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — Special California prisons intended to protect gang informants, disgraced cops and child molesters have become so violent, gang-riddled and crowded that officials are dismantling what’s become the United States’ largest protective custody program.
The inmates are gradually being integrated into the general prison population, where some advocacy groups fear they will be even worse off.
California created the so-called Sensitive Needs Yards nearly two decades ago.

By 2015, their population ballooned to about a third of the state prison system’s 130,000 inmates, with all the problems of a mainline prison: nearly 100 gangs; smuggling of drugs like the Fentanyl that killed one inmate and sickened 12 this spring; and killings like that of 54-year-old Gregory Miley, who was serving time for assisting in the rape, torture and strangling of teenage boys.
Sex offenders in particular were disproportionately dying in the very units created to protect them. The state corrections department’s inspector general reported 10 of the 11 inmate homicides in the first six months of 2014 were in the protective housing units. The Associated Press found eight of the 11 were sex offenders, and determined in a 2015 analysis that male sex offenders were being killed at a rate double their percentage in the prison population.

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