Travis Pennington, who bore the brunt of local outrage last year when the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation transferred a reported 39 prisoners from California’s Death Row at San Quentin Prison to the California Institution for Men at Chino, has departed as warden for a higher responsibility position with the state penal system.
He is being replaced by Eric Mejia, who has now assumed the title of acting warden in Chino.
Pennington is a fast-rising star in the world of corrections. In October 2021, he was a senior ranking – captain – prison guard. The following month, he was promoted to chief deputy warden. Two years later, in November 2023, while he remained in the rank of chief deputy warden, he was made the acting warden at the California Institution for Men. That turned into an eventful 14-month assignment.
Governor Gavin Newsom, who shortly after taking office enunciated his opposition to the death penalty and in 2020 initiated a pilot program to move a portion of the state’s condemned inmates – 104 of them – out of their traditional holding place at San Quentin Prison, decommissioned the death chamber their entirely in late 2023 and early 2024. In March 2024, he began one of his legacy programs, which called for dispatching the remaining 189 inmates at San Quentin who were sentenced to death and 20 from the women’s facility in Chowchilla to other prisons. In formulating that plan, Newsom seized upon Proposition 66, what had been proposed by its sponsors as a more hardnosed reform of the penal system as applied to capital punishment in the Golden State. Proposition 66 called for speeding the process of capital trials and executions, limiting the challenges to death sentences and eliminating objections and obstructions to the death penalty by those claiming it was a cruel and unusual punishment by prescribing a choice of four barbiturates for lethal injection: amobarbital, pentobarbital, secobarbital and thiopental. Proposition 66 also allowed those sentenced to death to work, with 70 percent of their pay to go toward restitution to their victims, insofar as they were housed in an institution which offered work programs and provided a level of security to prevent them from harming other inmates or escaping. The proposition authorized the state to house death row inmates in any prison, rather than the one death row prison for men and one death row prison for women.
Though Newsom’s critics pointed out he was selectively applying aspects of what is contained in Proposition 66 where it lines up with his personal philosophy and was ignoring the other elements of the proposition, he ordered Death Row inmates to be sent elsewhere. By the beginning of April 26 Death Row inmates had been transferred to Chino. By the end of June, when the transfers concluded, a total of 46 such inmates were sent to Chino.
Chino municipal officials said they were blindsided by the state’s action, having not been given any warning about the transfers until they were about to occur. Chino Mayor Eunice Ulloa demanded, “The Department of Corrections needs to immediately remove these horrifically violent offenders from CIM and house them in a prison that is capable of confining people who are sentenced to death.”
Chino officials referenced multiple previous registrations of local governments’ concerns over conditions, security and safety issues at the California Institution for Men, including a lawsuit filed in June 2019 by San Bernardino County, the City of Chino, the City of Chino Hills and the Chino Valley Independent Fire District jointly against the California Department of Corrections over the state’s failure to properly take into consideration potential security and public safety factors when it approved plans to construct a 50-bed, 48,000-square-foot mental health care facility at the prison. While a judged ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, finding merit to the assertion that the project’s environmental impact report inadequately delineated existing and future conditions within the prison as well as the intended improvements and made less than acceptable description of the project’s impacts and steps to offset them, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation deftly sidestepped the legal challenge by a simple revision of the environmental impact report.
Also referenced in the protest was a 2008 report of the State Office of the Inspector General and a companion audit. According to the report, there were security issues at the facility’s periphery, dilapidating housing units, leaking roofs, dysfunctional utilities extending to electricity and plumbing, and hazardous materials and unsafe conditions endangering inmates and staff that needed to be addressed. According to the Office of the Inspector General’s audit, the prison, which was built in 1941, had reached a level of intolerable dishabille through a lack of maintenance and neglect, such that annual outlays of $28 million were required to maintain the facility at a minimal state of “poor” condition to allow it to remain open. Local officials pointed out that nothing approaching that level of improvement had taken place and the target for such improvements was to bring it up to standards for a minimum and medium security institution rather than a maximum security facility capable of housing those convicted of capital offenses.
“Considering the Department of Corrections’ lack of investment in the upkeep and maintenance of CIM, I am appalled that they would choose to house the worst of the worst prisoners in our state in such close proximity to residences, schools, and businesses,” Mayor Ulloa said. “They have committed murder. They have committed rape. They have committed atrocities that you wouldn’t even want to know about.”
Chino Police Lieutenant Allen Kelleher emphasized that there is no buffer between the prison and the city.
“This prison is not isolated,” Kelleher said. “It is right in the middle of the community. There’s housing. There’s schools. There’s businesses that are right next to it. There’s a giant community park that’s next to this prison.”
As the Department of Corrections, the State of California and Newsom remained in a holding pattern as the former Death Row inmates continued to pour into Chino Prison, Local officials intensified their resistance.
Chino Police Chief Kevin Mensen said that of those condemned prisoners transferred to Chino so far, “One inmate killed a victim with an axe during a home invasion robbery. Another beat and tortured a woman to death. Another inmate murdered two teenagers working at a Subway sandwich shop. Another beat his ex-girlfriend, then lit her on fire in front of her children.”
San Bernardino County District Attorney Anderson said the transfers were creating a dangerous situation. He said of the incoming former Death Row inmates, “If they go to CIM, they’re going to be housed in the general population. They’re perhaps going to be housed in different areas within the prison.”
Anderson said Governor Newsom and the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation were engaging in sleight of hand by utilizing Proposition 66 as a justification for making the transfers. He said the state has a legal and moral responsibility “to maintain the death chamber for these inmates who were given the death penalty. We’re not in a situation and we should never be in a state in which portions of the law are chosen and other portions of the law are discarded regardless, depending upon your rhetoric and politics.”
On August 11, 2024 an incident wherein double murderer Kevin G. Roby used a makeshift knife he had obtained in an unsuccessful effort to kill a guard exemplified why the public was so alarmed with the circumstance.
The California Department of Corrections acknowledges that at approximately 8:30 p.m. on August 11, officers observed Roby, 60, exiting his housing unit wearing only his boxers with no shoes. Roby ignored officers’ orders to stop as he continued walking onto the yard, where he yelled he would kill anyone left on the yard and pulled out an inmate-manufactured weapon in a sheath from his boxers.
Officers summoned a Code I response and formed a skirmish line. Without warning or provocation, Roby ran toward the skirmish line. Staff immediately responded and used physical force and chemical agents to restrain him and quell the attack. During the response, Roby used the inmate-manufactured weapon to stab an officer on the side of his head. The officer survived.
In the face of that development and the multiple protests, the taciturn Pennington brassed it out, carrying off his assignment of maintaining the rectitude of the Department of Corrections’ mission boldly and imperturbably. While offering assurances that the safety of the Chino Valley community was being safeguarded by adequate precautions, Pennington made no actual concessions to the local demands or commitments that the State of California was unwilling to keep. Most importantly, he did not back off of the state’s transfer of Death Row prisoners to low and medium security facilities that were originally designed to house less serious offenders.
In December, Pennington was promoted to warden. After less than three months as a full-fledged warden, he is now being kicked upstairs. He is now moving into a regional leadership post that is in line with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation’s reorganization that went into effect on January 1, 2025. In accordance with the reorganization, he is to serve as the acting associate director for the Division of Adult Institutions in this region, working out of an office in Rancho Cucamonga. A primary facility under his purview is CIM.
At CIM, he is being succeeded by Mejia, who, while working under Pennington, was the acting chief deputy warden.