Here are the morning’s top stories on Wednesday, December 18, 2024…

• The warden at a troubled prison in northern California is retiring this month, and the governor has just given the former chief deputy warden there a big promotion. KQED reporters Julie Small and Sukey Lewis investigated this prison for their podcast On Our Watch, and they have an article out this week that tells the emotional story of a pair of whistleblowers who work there and the challenges they faced.
• The co-founders of failed Fresno startup Bitwise Industries have been sentenced to prison for wire fraud. 
• The federal Bureau of Prisons will pay more than $116 million to over 100 women who were allegedly sexually assaulted at the now-closed federal women’s prison in Dublin.

‘How To Kill A Cop’: Death, Despair And Corruption In California’s Most Violent Prison

A multiyear KQED investigation and an eight-part podcast called On Our Watch found a persistent code of silence among New Folsom officers that went largely unchecked by prison leadership and the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). An exclusive analysis of hundreds of internal use-of-force records, dozens of leaked documents and videos, and interviews with current and former CDCR officers revealed a culture of cover-ups that enabled the abuse of incarcerated people, officer-on-officer harassment and at least two homicides at the prison.

Bitwise Industries Co-Founders Sentenced To Prison

The co-founders of Bitwise Industries, a failed Fresno-based tech startup that went bankrupt and led to the forced layoff of 900 workers across the country, were sentenced Tuesday by a federal judge in Fresno.

Jake Soberal will spend 11 years in prison. Irma Olguin, Jr. was sentenced to nine years. The two were also ordered to pay more than $114 million in restitution.

The sentence followed a lengthy hearing in which lawyers representing the U.S. government requested maximum prison sentences and a handful of investors provided impassioned testimony about the money the co-founders had taken from them under false pretenses. Attorneys for Soberal and Olguin, Jr. requested five years in prison for their clients, re-framing the two as desperate entrepreneurs who made “some very very bad decisions” in order to save their company and make payroll.

US To Pay Nearly $116 Million To Settle Sexual Abuse Lawsuits At California Women’s Prison

The U.S. government will pay nearly $116 million to resolve lawsuits brought by more than 100 women who say they were abused or mistreated at a now-shuttered federal prison in California that was known as the “rape club” because of rampant staff-on-inmate sexual misconduct.

Under settlements approved Tuesday, the Justice Department will pay an average of about $1.1 million to each of 103 women who sued the Bureau of Prisons over their treatment at the Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin, California.

The agreements were finalized the same day a federal judge gave preliminary approval to a settlement in a separate class-action lawsuit that requires the Bureau of Prisons to open some facilities to a court-appointed monitor and publicly acknowledge abuse at FCI Dublin.