Leaked Video Footage Shows California Prison Guards Engaged in Retaliatory Assault
by Jo Ellen Nott
Leaked surveillance and body-camera footage from the Central California Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla exposed a brutal August 2, 2024, assault on incarcerated women, many of whom were elderly or mobility-impaired. CCWF is the state’s largest women’s prison, with an intended capacity of 2,000 prisoners (although it is frequently overcrowded, such as in 2021 when it locked up 2,640 prisoners).
The videos, leaked in late December 2025 and early January 2026, show guards, members of a gang known as the “Delta Dogs,” carelessly dousing women in a cafeteria with chemical spray and detonating smoke grenades among those in wheelchairs and walkers. Two federal lawsuits allege the violence was a retaliatory “correction” after women filed sexual misconduct complaints under the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA). The videos were posted by Hector Ferrel, a former guard who resigned in 2022 and sued the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) in 2025 alleging disability discrimination.
Despite CCWF Warden Anissa De La Cruz’s claims that she would not have approved the underlying property search, leaked internal audio from mid-December 2025 suggested a coordinated effort to “gain control” of the “defiant” unit. Plaintiffs report suffering seizures and traumatic brain injuries from the chemical onslaught.
The footage appears as women’s prisons in California fall under increasing scrutiny. In December 2024, the federal Bureau of Prisons reached a $115.8 million settlement, the largest in its history, with more than 100 women who were assaulted at the now-shuttered Federal Correctional Institution in Dublin. [See: PLN, July 2025, p.1]. In August 2025, a CDCR guard at CCWF, Gregory Rodriguez, was sentenced to 224 years for sexually abusing nine women at the facility.
Although the videos bolster the two PREA lawsuits concerning CCWF, advocates fear it will become more difficult for prisoners to file complaints under the PREA going forward given that federal funding for the PREA Resource Center was slashed by the Trump administration’s Department of Justice in April 2025.
Source: San Francisco Chronicle
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