FCI Mendota: Visiting, Mail, Commissary and Inspections

By Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., and Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA

FCI Mendota at a glance

FCI Mendota is a medium-security federal prison for men in Mendota, California, in western Fresno County, with an adjacent minimum-security satellite camp. As of September 2026, it held 769 people, 648 in the institution and 121 at the camp. It sits about 40 miles west of Fresno.

Official name	Federal Correctional Institution, Mendota
BOP code	MEN
Security level	Medium; men
Population	769 (as of September 2026)
Visiting	Saturday, Sunday, and federal holidays, 8:15 a.m.–3:00 p.m.; no one processed before 8:00 a.m. or after 2:00 p.m.
Inmate mail	FCI: Inmate Name & Register Number · FCI Mendota · Federal Correctional Institution · P.O. Box 9 · Mendota, CA 93640 Camp: Inmate Name & Register Number · FCI Mendota · Federal Correctional Institution · Satellite Camp · P.O. Box 9 · Mendota, CA 93640
Send money	Lockbox · Western Union (code city FBOP, DC) · MoneyGram (receive code 7932)
Phone	559-274-4000 · Fax 559-274-4223
Street address	33500 West California Avenue, Mendota, CA 93640 · Fresno County
Judicial district	Eastern District of California
BOP region	Western
Special Housing Unit	Yes
RDAP	No
UNICOR	Unsettled; see the programs section
Camp	Minimum-security satellite camp

FCI Mendota is one of the newest prisons in the federal system, and it is running well below what it was built for: the Bureau designed it for 1,280 beds. It is in the Bureau’s Western Region and the Eastern District of California. When the prison was audited under the Prison Rape Elimination Act in March 2024, 817 of the 943 men held here, 87 percent, were recorded as limited English proficient.

There is no Mendota Correctional Facility, and the other Mendota is in Wisconsin

Two naming problems send people looking for FCI Mendota to the wrong place.

The first is the name itself. The Bureau’s roster record calls this institution FCI Mendota and displays it as “Mendota FCI.” “Mendota Correctional Facility” is not a Bureau name and no federal prison carries it, though directory sites use it constantly. If a form, a letter, or a court filing uses that phrase, it is describing this prison, but the Bureau will not recognize the name.

The second is geography. Searching for “Mendota” and “inmate” returns the Mendota Mental Health Institute at 301 Troy Drive, Madison, Wisconsin, a psychiatric hospital run by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services that takes court-ordered competency cases and houses the Mendota Juvenile Treatment Center. It is a state health facility 1,900 miles from this one, and its patients do not appear in the federal inmate locator.

California holds ten federal institutions, second only to Texas, and several of their names collide — three prisons share one Victorville address, two share Lompoc, and one of that pair used to be a penitentiary. That roster, code by code, is on our page for USP Atwater and in our guide to federal prisons in California. Mendota is not part of a complex: the Bureau’s roster gives it no complex code, and the camp beside it belongs to this institution alone.

What is the security level at FCI Mendota?

Medium security at the main institution, minimum security at the satellite camp. The 2024 PREA audit records the custody levels held here as Medium, Minimum, In, and Out, which is the audit’s way of saying that both sides of the fence are in use.

Which side a man lands on is decided before he arrives, by the Designation and Sentence Computation Center under the Bureau’s security designation rules, on a security point score and on whether any Public Safety Factor applies. A Public Safety Factor overrides the point total: it is what keeps a person out of a camp however low he scores, and it is the part of designation families least expect. Our guides to medium security and minimum security explain what each level means day to day.

Mendota is a young prison that is emptying. The 2024 PREA audit puts the designed capacity at 1,280 and answers “Yes” to whether the facility had been over capacity in the preceding twelve months. The direction since is one way: 943 on the first day of that audit in March 2024, 878 when the Inspector General walked in that June, 818 in June 2026, 769 in September 2026.

How the camp opened before the prison did

Most listings say FCI Mendota opened in January 2012; the Justice Department’s own records are more precise. In its audit of the Bureau’s fiscal year 2011 accounts (Report 12-09, January 12, 2012), the Inspector General wrote that the Bureau increased capacity “by bringing on-line the remaining beds at FCI McDowell and the minimum security satellite camp at FCI Mendota,” and missed its target “due to greater than expected inmate growth and lack of funding to bring on-line the medium security beds at FCI Mendota.” The camp opened first. The prison it is attached to was still waiting on money.

The following year’s audit (Report 13-09, January 23, 2013) recorded that “capacity from activating facilities (FCI Mendota, CA and FCI Berlin, NH) increased by 564 beds,” with 552 more Mendota beds scheduled for 2013.

The building took even longer. The Department’s 2011 capital asset plan describes a prison “designed as a 1,152 bed medium security prison with a 128 bed work camp,” awarded as a design/build project in 2004 and then starved: “While the project was fully funded in 2002 … Congress subsequently rescinded resources in FY 2002 and FY 2004.” Full construction funding arrived only in February 2007, construction finished in January 2010, and the camp and a UNICOR factory were added by a contract modification of September 25, 2009.

The cost figure repeated in most listings is $235 million. The Department’s own plan gives a life-cycle total of $259.9 million excluding federal personnel costs and $265.7 million including them, and lists two design/build contracts worth $250.4 million between them. That plan is an estimate rather than a final accounting, and no final figure has been published, but $235 million is not what the Department was telling the Office of Management and Budget.

Does FCI Mendota publish anything in Spanish?

Yes — two of its five published documents, and both are complete translations rather than summaries. The Spanish handbook carries the same date as the English one, “Febrero 12, 2025,” and the Spanish visiting supplement reproduces the whole of MEN 5267.09C, header, supplement number, and date included.

Publishing in Spanish is not rare in the Bureau: 75 of its 118 institutions post a Spanish handbook on bop.gov. What is unusual is the population these particular translations serve. On the first day of this facility’s PREA audit, March 26, 2024, the auditor recorded 943 men here and 817 of them as limited English proficient — 87 percent. The same field on the same form records 69 at USP Atwater, 77 at FCC Lompoc, and 4 at FCI Herlong.

That number is why the auditor found standard 115.16 — inmates with disabilities and inmates who are limited English proficient — met, on a record that includes the Bureau’s 2023 LanguageLine telephone-interpretation agreement and a 2020 memorandum on telephonic translation. Her site-review note reads: “PREA Notices, as well as other advisement notices, were posted in languages spoken by significant portions of the offender population; namely, English and Spanish.”

Two practical consequences follow. The institution publishes no Spanish commissary order form. And the Bureau runs Spanish-language residential drug treatment at exactly two institutions, FCI Miami and FMC Carswell, according to the 2026 RDAP locations list inside its August 2026 First Step Act guide. Neither is in California, and Mendota has no RDAP of any kind. A Spanish-speaking man here who needs the residential program is looking at a transfer across the country.

Who are the notable inmates at FCI Mendota?

The best-known person held at FCI Mendota is James Charles Kopp; most of the other names attached to this prison online belong to people who left years ago.

Name	Status in Bureau records	Case
James Charles Kopp	Currently held here. Register number 11761-055; age 72; projected release recorded as LIFE	Convicted in the Western District of New York of the 1998 killing of Dr. Barnett Slepian. Judgment entered June 22, 2007, “sentencing him principally to a term of life imprisonment for intentionally inflicting on a person, because that person was a provider of reproductive health services, an injury resulting in death, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 248,” plus ten consecutive years for a firearm count. Affirmed, United States v. Kopp, 562 F.3d 141 (2d Cir. 2009)
Luis Hernando Gómez Bustamante	Former — Bureau records place him at FCI Thomson, Illinois, with a projected release of August 31, 2032	Colombian trafficker extradited to the United States and convicted of racketeering; routinely and wrongly listed at Mendota
Richard Joseph Scutari	Former — released January 21, 2025, after 38 years; his last Bureau record is RRM Orlando, a residential reentry office in Florida	Member of the white-supremacist group The Order, sentenced in 1987 to 60 years for racketeering and robbery
Frankie Maybee	Former — released June 23, 2022, not November 2020 as widely published; last Bureau record FCI Texarkana, Texas	The first person sentenced under the 2009 hate crimes statute, for running a car carrying five Hispanic men off an Arkansas road

Three facts are often published wrong. Gómez Bustamante is at FCI Thomson in Illinois, not here. Scutari was released in January 2025 and is no longer in Bureau custody anywhere. Frankie Maybee was released more than four years ago, so listings that describe him as “serving an 11-year sentence” are out of date: the release date in Bureau records is June 23, 2022, and the widely repeated date of November 3, 2020, is wrong. Jeffrey Bizzack, of the college admissions prosecution, and Jeremy Meeks both served time here and left, in 2020 and 2016.

One name is here for a different reason. Edgar Enriquez, register number 73975-298, was 38 and serving 109 months imposed in the Southern District of California when he was found missing from the satellite camp at about 9 p.m. on Sunday, March 22, 2026. The Bureau’s locator now reads “Escaped On” with that date, which is how it records a walkaway. There is no published report of a recapture.

How do I find someone at FCI Mendota?

To find someone at FCI Mendota, use the Bureau’s free public Inmate Locator. Search by the eight-digit register number if you have it, because the locator matches the committed name rather than the name anyone uses, and Spanish surnames with two family names are frequently entered differently on the judgment than in daily life. What comes back is the facility he is in now and his projected release date, for anyone in federal custody since 1982. If it finds nothing, the usual reasons are that the person is in state custody, that they are held pretrial by the U.S. Marshals Service in a county jail, or that the spelling on the judgment differs from the spelling you know.

It shows the facility by a short name, and the California names are easy to confuse. “Mendota FCI” is this prison. “Atwater USP” and “Herlong FCI” are other California prisons, “Lompoc I FCI” and “Lompoc II FCI” are two different prisons at Lompoc, and “Victorville Medium I FCI,” “Victorville Medium II FCI,” and “Victorville USP” are three different prisons at one Victorville address. For someone who finished a sentence in a halfway house, the locator’s record carries a residential reentry office rather than a prison (for example code CSC, Sacramento). See our guide to how register numbers work for what the digits mean.

How do I write to someone at FCI Mendota?

Letters to anyone at FCI Mendota go to P.O. Box 9, Mendota, CA 93640, and because the institution and the camp share that box, the address block has to say which one. The committed name and register number go on the first line, and mail without a register number comes back.

For someone at the FCI	For someone at the satellite camp
Inmate Name & Register Number FCI Mendota Federal Correctional Institution P.O. Box 9 Mendota, CA 93640	Inmate Name & Register Number FCI Mendota Federal Correctional Institution Satellite Camp P.O. Box 9 Mendota, CA 93640

Those are the blocks on the Bureau’s facility page. The institution’s 2025 handbook prints a different one, with no camp version at all; use the Bureau’s, and add the housing unit if you know it. Two other boxes at the same post office do different jobs: staff mail goes to P.O. Box 39, and freight goes to the street address marked ATTN: WAREHOUSE. An inmate parcel sent to either is a parcel lost.

Incoming mail is opened, inspected for contraband, and distributed by the unit officer Monday to Friday, after the 4:00 p.m. count clears. Legal mail is different: it must be marked “Legal Mail — Open only in the presence of the inmate,” it is opened in front of him, and his signature goes in a log. Certified mail that does not meet the legal-mail test is opened in the mail room first. Our guide to attorney-client communication in the Bureau of Prisons covers what that marking protects, and writing to someone in federal prison covers what gets rejected.

Outgoing mail may not be sealed unless it is legal or special mail, and every envelope must carry an address label generated on the prison’s TRULINCS terminals — a handwritten address on an outgoing envelope will not do. Men at the FCI hand legal mail to the mail room during the weekday legal-mail call; men at the camp hand it to the unit officer. Mail arriving after release is forwarded for thirty days. Never put money in a letter: “The institutional mail room does not accept funds received from outside the institution. Any funds received will be returned to the sender.”

How do I send money to someone at FCI Mendota?

Money for someone at FCI Mendota never goes to the prison. Every deposit runs through the Bureau’s national lockbox in Iowa or one of two wire services, and each route needs the committed name and the eight-digit register number.

Route	Where it goes	Notes
Postal money order or cashier’s check	Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Name Inmate Register Number Post Office Box 474701 Des Moines, Iowa 50947-0001	The address printed at page 24 of the institution’s handbook. Postal money orders post without a hold; most other instruments carry one
Western Union Quick Collect	Code city FBOP, DC	Fastest of the three
MoneyGram	Receive code 7932, company name Federal Bureau of Prisons, Washington, DC	Online transfers are capped

No cash and no personal checks. Our full guide to sending money to a federal prisoner compares each route and its cost. Before you send a large sum, read the commissary section below: there is a monthly ceiling on what the money can be spent on, and at this institution there is a biweekly ceiling underneath it.

He can check his own balance without waiting for mail, by dialing 118 followed by his phone access code on any inmate telephone, or through TRULINCS. A balance check helps, because families routinely send a second payment believing the first went astray.

What are the visiting hours at FCI Mendota?

General population visiting at FCI Mendota and its camp runs on Saturdays, Sundays, and federal holidays, 8:15 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., under Institution Supplement MEN 5267.09C, the local supplement to the Bureau’s visiting regulations, dated January 23, 2025, which replaced the 2021 version. There is no weekday and no evening visiting.

The cutoff matters more than the closing time: “Social visitors will not be processed before 8:00 a.m. or after 2:00 p.m. on visiting days.” A visitor who arrives at 2:05 p.m. will not be processed, even though the room stays open until 3:00.

Special Housing Unit visits are non-contact, end at 2:00 p.m. and are taken first come, first served — but the Bureau’s two documents disagree about the days. The January 2025 supplement says “SHU inmate visits will be conducted on Saturday and Sunday from 8:15 a.m. – 2:00 p.m.” The Admission & Orientation handbook, published three weeks later, says “Special Housing inmates will visit on Fridays from 8:15 AM – 2:00 PM.” The supplement is the institution’s governing visiting directive, so it controls; if the man you are visiting is in the SHU, call 559-274-4000 before you drive.

Who can visit, and how many

• Four approved visitors at a time, not counting an infant on a lap. The supplement’s own visitor handout shows the change being made, with “six (6)” struck through and “four (4)” written in.
• Up to twenty people may be on the approved visiting list, amendable at any time by written request or at a Unit Team review. Twenty is generous by Bureau standards.
• “Ordinarily, inmates will have unlimited visiting privileges during regular scheduled visiting times.” There is no monthly points allowance at this institution.
• Everyone needs a background check — and here that includes family. The handout states that “It has been deemed appropriate to conduct background checks on all visitors entering FCI Mendota. All visitors will be required to submit the completed Visitor Information form (BP-629) to the Unit Team for review, including individuals verified in your Presentence Investigation Report as immediate family or minor child.” Many institutions list immediate family provisionally for thirty days. This one does not.
• The form must be complete — “Forms not fully completed, ie missing information, will be rejected” — with a photocopy of the visitor’s government identification. Anyone the inmate did not know before he was locked up will be denied.
• If the room fills, the Institution Duty Officer can cut every visit to two hours — and the order in which visits are cut is published: volunteers first, then the visitors who live nearest, then the people who visit most often.

What visitors can wear and bring

Mendota’s color rules are longer than most institutions’, and the reason sits in a different document. The inmate dress code in the A&O handbook records that the FCI uniform is khaki and the camp uniform is spruce green. So the visiting supplement bars khaki or tan clothing, green clothing of any kind, orange, gray sweat gear, and plain T-shirts in gray, khaki, green, orange, white, red, or yellow. At a prison with one uniform color, green is usually fine. Here it is not, and a green top will send you back to your car.

Also prohibited: shorts except on a child under twelve; sheer clothing; tank, halter, midriff, and strapless tops; spandex; bib overalls; hooded clothing; camouflage; medical scrubs; anything resembling a staff uniform; hats; and watches. Skirts must reach the knee with no slit above it, and shoes must have a heel or strap to the foot. One rule trips people up at the metal detector: “Visitors will refrain from wearing undergarments containing metal (i.e. underwire bra).”

What you may carry in is short: one clear plastic bag or change purse no larger than six inches square; no more than $25.00 for the vending machines in denominations of $5.00 or less, or a debit card; photo identification; essential medication in the exact amount needed, held by the Visiting Room Officer; and feminine hygiene products. A short list of infant items is allowed, but baby carriers and strollers are not.

Everything else goes in a coin-operated locker in the waiting area — coats, hats, keys, cell phones, billfolds, and watches. Bring a coin. Visitors may buy food from the machines for the man they are visiting, but he may never handle money, may not go near the machines, and may take nothing back to the unit. Contact is limited to an embrace and a kiss on arrival and departure.

Identification and screening

Photo identification is required for everyone over sixteen and must be “valid state or government-issued.” The supplement names what will not work: “Check cashing cards[,] Consulate Cards and other easily produced forms of identification are not appropriate.” A consular identification card is a normal document in this part of California, and it will not get you through the lobby.

Every visitor, contractor, and volunteer is subject to the ion spectrometry device, the swab test for drug residue. A positive result, or an attempt to bring in an unauthorized item, costs more than the day: “the visitor(s) will not be granted entry into the institution for a minimum of 48 hours.” The same bar applies if a visit is terminated for misconduct.

Hands are stamped and checked under a black-light wand three times on the way in and again on the way out. A surgically implanted plate, pin, or pacemaker needs medical documentation supplied in advance. No one may wait in a car: a driver who is not visiting has to leave the property. See our guide to federal prison visitation for the system-wide rules and searches, shakedowns, and contraband on screening.

On the inmate side, general population men at the FCI change into institution-issued khaki jumpsuits and boots for a visit, camp residents wear spruce green, and personal sneakers are barred from the visiting room.

Getting to FCI Mendota

The institution is at 33500 West California Avenue, on the edge of the town of Mendota. From Fresno, take Highway 180 west, turn left onto Panoche Road, which becomes California Avenue, and turn right into the institution. From Interstate 5 southbound, take Exit 379 at Shields Avenue; from I-5 northbound, Exit 349 at Derrick Avenue and Highway 33 North. The FCI and the camp have separate visitor parking lots, and you must use the right one; recreational vehicles may not park on institution grounds at all.

Fresno Yosemite International Airport is about forty miles away. Both Bureau documents describe it as forty miles “West” of the prison; it is east, and the distance is the part to rely on.

The handbook lists a public transit route to the prison: Mendota Transit on 1-800-325-7433, with demand-responsive service and scheduled Westside Transit runs through Kerman to Fresno and Firebaugh. Both services run Monday to Friday, and visiting is on Saturday, Sunday, and federal holidays, so the bus the prison lists does not run on visiting days.

How do phone calls and email work at FCI Mendota?

Calls from FCI Mendota go out, never in: a man places them to numbers on his approved list. Your number has to be on that list, which holds thirty numbers, and he may submit changes once a calendar month.

The Bureau’s telephone regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, issued September 3, 2026, rescinded the 2008 policy and reset the numbers: “Inmates with ITS accounts are limited to 510 minutes per calendar month.” Of those, “Inmates eligible for FSA telephone incentives will receive 300 minutes per month at no charge,” and anyone who exhausts the 300-minute limit, whether or not he is eligible for the incentive, “may purchase an additional 210 minutes.” Individual calls “should generally not exceed 15 minutes,” and there must be at least thirty minutes between completed calls. The monthly limit does not apply to properly arranged unmonitored legal calls. Listings that give a 300-minute limit reflect the policy replaced in September 2026, and the new policy contains no holiday supplement. Our guide to federal inmate phone calls sets out how the accounts and charges work.

Electronic messaging runs on TRULINCS, which a family joins through CorrLinks. It is text only, and the local rules add a session cap: one electronic request to staff per day, no duplicates, no sending the same request to two staff members, a maximum session of thirty minutes, and printing at fifteen cents a page. See our page on CorrLinks and TRULINCS for the sign-up steps and the per-minute charge. Email with a lawyer is not privileged; privileged written communication has to go by marked special mail.

The handbook also tells men that they can use TRULINCS to report sexual abuse straight to the Justice Department’s Inspector General by opening the Request to Staff tab and choosing the department mailbox called “DOJ Sexual Abuse Reporting.” Those messages “are untraceable at the local institution, are forwarded directly to OIG, will not be saved in your e-mail ‘Sent’ list, do not allow for a reply from OIG,” and anonymity from the Bureau has to be requested in the message itself. The handbook also states the limit: the mailbox is read during business hours Monday to Friday and “It is not a 24-hour hotline.”

What can people buy at the FCI Mendota commissary?

The national monthly spending limit at FCI Mendota, as at every federal prison, is $460, set by the Bureau’s trust fund rules, Program Statement 4500.13, issued May 7, 2026, which records that it “Increases spending limit from $360 to $460 per month.” The limit rises by $50 during the November and December holiday period, for no more than one validation period. Both of Mendota’s own commissary documents predate that change and both still print $360: the order form, last updated in 2023, and the 2025 handbook.

The local rule underneath the national one has not been superseded, and it governs a family’s timing. The handbook states: “FCI and SPC Mendota’s Spending Limit is 360.00 but is limited to a bi-weekly limit of 180.00. Each inmate account is revalidated on the 1st and 15th of each month.” A biweekly split is expressly permitted by national policy. So money arriving on the 14th is spent against one biweekly limit and money arriving on the 16th against the next. No document published by this institution says whether the local biweekly figure moved with the national ceiling; none has been revised since the increase. Ask the unit team in writing before assuming.

Items excluded from the limit under the 2026 policy include stamps, over-the-counter medications, vitamins, copy cards and paper, footwear, mattresses, nicotine replacement products, and a secured media device.

On the institution’s 2023 form, the most recent it publishes, typewriter ribbons are $9.70 and a print wheel $19.40; legal work is still typed here, on law library typewriters reserved for legal material.

The food list includes white, brown, and cheese rice; refried beans plain, with jalapeños, and with chorizo; and El Pato yellow chilies. Kosher and halal items are marked individually with (K) and (H) throughout. Religious items are sold under a separate rule — a Rasta crown, a Native American headband, a miswak stick, a kufi, a prayer rug, and three prayer oils, all under a line reading “SEE CHAPLAIN FOR APPROVAL PRIOR TO SALE.”

Shopping rules are printed on the form itself: “All sales are final. Inmates will verify their purchases at the sales window prior to leaving the area. Any discrepancies must be addressed at the sales window before the inmate finishes his sale … There are no refunds substitutions or exchanges.” Athletic shoes are tried on at the window before the sale completes. The local commissary supplement is MEN 4500.12; our page on the federal prison commissary covers the national rules.

What programs are available at FCI Mendota?

FCI Mendota offers education, vocational training, recreation, and non-residential drug programming, but no residential drug treatment, and the Bureau’s First Step Act guide describes the institution only through a grid.

Drug treatment, and why RDAP is not offered here

There is no Residential Drug Abuse Program at FCI Mendota. The institution says so itself: “The RDAP is available in 77 Bureau institutions. FCI-Mendota is not one of those locations; however, RDAP transfers to other institutions who have the program occur frequently.” The 2026 RDAP locations list inside the Bureau’s August 2026 First Step Act Approved Programs Guide lists five Western Region programs — FCI Herlong, FCI Lompoc, FCI Phoenix, FCI Safford, and FCI Sheridan — and Mendota is not among them. The guide’s programs-by-institution table marks a dot, not a cross, against both residential drug treatment rows in this institution’s column.

Completing RDAP can mean up to a year off a sentence under 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e), and it cannot be earned at FCI Mendota. The handbook’s own advice is to start early: “Ordinarily inmates are interviewed 48-24 months from release depending on the facility’s security level and waiting list for the RDAP.” A referral and transfer request made three years out is a different conversation from one made eighteen months out.

What does run here is the Drug Abuse Education course and the non-residential program, with a completion incentive of up to $30, registered by written request or by emailing the institution’s MEN-InmateToDAP mailbox. Anyone whose presentence report documents a drug history is required to take the education course, and failing to do so blocks performance pay above maintenance level, bonus pay, and vacation pay.

Education and vocational training

GED classes run at two levels with open entry, and the diploma is issued by the State of California. English as a Second Language is certified through the CASAS examination — in a prison where 87 percent of the population was recorded as limited English proficient, that is the busiest classroom in the building. Vocational training is offered in Warehousing, Building Trades, Automotive, and Culinary Arts, and college correspondence courses are available at the student’s own expense. There is an electronic law library, and typewriters are reserved for legal material.

The handbook also spells out a rule that costs good conduct time: under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act and the Prison Litigation Reform Act, a man without a high school credential who does not progress toward a GED can fail to earn the maximum good conduct time, regardless of deportation status. For how these programs run system-wide, see prison education and vocational training.

Two Bureau records disagree about apprenticeships and Federal Prison Industries at Mendota. The August 2026 guide’s programs-by-institution table marks this institution for Occupational Education — Vocational Apprenticeship and for Federal Prison Industries, the Bureau’s UNICOR program. The institution’s own 2025 handbook mentions neither, and listings that say there is no UNICOR here conflict with the Justice Department’s 2011 capital asset plan, which records that a UNICOR factory was built at Mendota and completed before February 2011. A building exists; a program is marked in a grid; the handbook is silent. Ask the unit team in writing. The grid is the weaker record: no program description in the guide names Mendota at all, so the table is this institution’s only per-institution entry.

Read the same way, the table marks this institution for anger management, basic cognitive skills, the Bureau literacy program, criminal thinking, dialectical behavior therapy, emotional self-regulation, ESL, faith-based conflict management, family programming, national parenting, non-residential drug treatment, four strands of occupational education, post-secondary education, social skills training, Threshold, and Wellness Inside and Out — and a dot against Life Connections, Challenge, BRAVE, Resolve, mental health step-down, and both sex offender programs. Approval to offer a program is not the same as a class running this month with a place in it.

Religion, recreation, and reentry

Religious Services runs the chapel, a religious library, the religious diet program by application to the Chaplain, and marriage requests under a separate local supplement at the inmate’s own expense. It also hosts Prisoner Visitation & Support, the community volunteer program that visits men who otherwise receive no visits at all, and PVS volunteers do not need to be on anyone’s visiting list.

Recreation has an outdoor yard (six handball and racquetball courts, two softball fields, five basketball courts, a soccer field, and a quarter-mile track), a gymnasium, and an indoor leisure center. The music program runs in two band rooms, with classes in basic and advanced guitar, basic and advanced drums, music theory — and accordion. Hobby craft covers leather kits, ceramics, stick art, crochet, seed beading, and painting, though only pencil, pastel, and chalk are allowed in the housing units. There is a Gentlemen’s Chess Club for men who finish the beginner and advanced classes.

On the First Step Act itself, the handbook carries one warning. The SPARC-13 needs assessment includes self-assessment surveys that have to be completed on TRULINCS, and “Failure on the Inmate’s part to complete the self-assessment surveys timely will delay completion and negatively Impact the inmate’s ability to begin earning FTCs as the Inmate will be considered to have ‘opted out,’ and therefore will be in non-earning status regardless of eligibility to earn FTCs.” Men lose months of First Step Act time credits to an unopened survey. Initial classification happens within 28 days of arrival and program reviews every 90 to 180 days after that.

What is daily life like at FCI Mendota?

Daily life at FCI Mendota is built around five official counts and a Monday-to-Friday work week, under the rules in the institution’s 2025 Admission & Orientation handbook.

Wake-up	6:00 a.m., every day
Official counts	12:00 a.m., 3:00 a.m., 5:00 a.m., 4:00 p.m., and 9:00 p.m.; the 4:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. counts are standing counts
Extra weekend count	10:00 a.m. stand-up count on weekends and federal holidays
Work week	Monday to Friday, 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.
Sick call	Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday; Wednesday is clinic day for physicals and testing
Camp curfew	Out of bounds anywhere outside the camp housing unit without a staff escort between 8:30 p.m. and 6:00 a.m.
TRULINCS session	Maximum 30 minutes; one electronic request to staff per day

One local rule decides which unit eats first. Meal rotation here is “ordinarily based on weekly sanitation ratings of each unit,” with the cleanest unit called first and the worst called last. Unit officers and counselors inspect cells daily and publish individual ratings, so a man’s cellmate’s housekeeping is his problem too.

Personal property lives in one wall locker, with five pairs of footwear under the bottom bunk. The dress code runs to two pages and ends with a sanction: failing to comply “may receive an incident report for prohibited act code 306, ‘Refusing to Accept a Program Assignment.'”

Health care access differs between the two sides of the fence. At the FCI, men sign up for sick call in Health Services from about 7:00 to 7:30 a.m. and hand a triage slip to the nurse. At the camp the slip goes into a mailbox in Health Services, and the handbook warns that “Cop-outs placed in the sick-call box will not be addressed” — the wrong form in the right box is the same as nothing. Health Services staff round in the Special Housing Unit daily, non-urgent appointments “can take up to two (2) weeks to be scheduled,” and there is a $2.00 co-pay per visit. The handbook prints two different pill-line windows on the same page, and neither is marked as superseding the other.

One rule affects every man who transfers in. A medical duty status form — the document behind a lower-bunk pass, a soft-shoe pass, a no-lifting restriction — does not travel. “MDS forms are only valid if they are issued from FCI Mendota, other forms issued by other institutions are NOT valid.” And whatever expiration date is printed on it, any accommodation is “valid for up to a MAXIMUM of one (1) year from the issue date, regardless of the expiration date.” A man arriving with a lower-bunk pass from another prison has no pass until Health Services here writes a new one. Our guide to medical care in federal prison covers the sick call and appeal routes; escalation here starts with the Health Services Administrator at afternoon mainline on weekdays at the FCI, and Friday afternoons at the camp.

The handbook also treats valley fever, a risk specific to this part of California, as a health topic in its own right. It is caused by a soil fungus, Coccidioides, breathed in with dust; the handbook says it is “not transmitted person to person,” that most people infected have no symptoms and that those who do resemble flu or pneumonia, that “immunosuppressed people, those with HIV or cancer” are at greater risk, that antifungal medication treats it, and that there is no vaccine. If someone in your family has an immune condition and is being designated to a Central Valley institution, that paragraph is a reason to put it in writing to the unit team before the designation is final.

What do inspectors say about conditions at FCI Mendota?

Inspectors examined FCI Mendota twice in 2024: a Prison Rape Elimination Act auditor in March and the Justice Department’s Inspector General, without warning, in June. Unannounced Inspector General inspections are rare. The Inspector General states its own count, most recently in its inspection of USP Canaan, Report 26-055, published May 21, 2026: “Since 2023, the OIG has conducted inspections at 14 BOP institutions: 7 individual facility inspections, 6 inspections conducted as part of the OIG’s Concurrent Inspections of BOP Food Service Operations, and the most recent ongoing inspection effort at Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) Berlin in New Hampshire.” Fourteen out of 118, and FCI Mendota is one of them. The District of Columbia’s Corrections Information Council, the other body that publishes prison inspections, has not inspected this facility; it goes where D.C. Code offenders are held, and it has been to USP Atwater but not here.

The Inspector General’s unannounced inspection

On Tuesday, June 4, 2024, the Inspector General entered six federal prisons at once, one in each Bureau region, with no notice. FCI Mendota was the Western Region’s. Teams of four were on the ground by 11 a.m. Eastern; because Mendota is on Pacific time, its inspection “was initiated at 8 a.m. local time.” The six were picked “based on their relative scores from the OIG’s prison inspection risk assessment tool, as well as the volume and nature of complaints submitted to the OIG regarding institution operations.” The inspections ran through Thursday, June 6, and the results were published on June 17, 2025, as Concurrent Inspections of BOP Food Service Operations, Report 25-062. The population during the June 2024 inspection was 766 at the FCI and 112 at the camp.

The inspectors’ Mendota section opens with what they did not find: “During our inspection, we did not identify any obvious indications that the food served to inmates was unsafe. We did, however, identify issues with food service operations, which we discuss below.”

• Food service was staffed at 70 percent — 12 of 17 authorized positions filled. The Food Service Administrator said staff worked compensatory hours to cover vacant posts; employees said that even so “there are often not enough department employees to cover all shifts.”
• The camp kitchen closes when staffing runs short. “When there is an employee shortage, the institution closes the independent food service operation at the Camp and prepares all inmate meals at the FCI. Meals are then transported from the FCI kitchen directly to the Camp housing unit, where inmates eat instead of in the Camp’s cafeteria.” It was not happening during the June visit, but staff and inmates said it regularly had — and in July 2024 an employee told the inspectors camp residents were being fed in the housing unit again, and that the food and food waste there “contributed to an increased presence of rodents and other insects, creating unsanitary conditions.”
• Knives were handled properly — the OIG “found that FCI Mendota complied with BOP policy for the management and tracking of knives and other dangerous tools,” which is not what it found at three of the other five institutions. But it also found “a large, sharp piece of metal, which could be fashioned into a weapon, on top of the locked knife cage” in a tool room next to the kitchen, and photographed a dead rodent behind the x-ray machine in the food warehouse.
• The pallet x-ray machine — the scanner that checks incoming food deliveries for contraband — had not worked for at least two years. The Bureau replied that policy does not require pallet x-ray machines and that manual searches are used; the OIG answered that “Notwithstanding the value of manual searches, we believe that pallet x-ray machines can still assist the BOP in preventing the introduction of contraband.”
• Cameras were the one thing Mendota did better than the rest: “FCI Mendota was the only institution among the six we inspected that had security cameras in its main food storage warehouse.” The smaller satellite warehouse beside the camp had none.
• One of two warehouse freezers had been dead for almost a year, and the institution was renting two mobile freezer trailers at $1,000 a month each. Inside the freezer that did work, pallets were stacked “creating a serious safety hazard as food packages could fall on inmates and BOP employees working in the area.”
• Only one mobile food cart had a working heater, so food sent to housing units “may have been served lukewarm or cold.” The OIG saw no delay long enough to create a food-safety risk, but flagged it as a particular problem at the camp, where men “regularly must be fed in the housing unit.”

Mendota was not the worst of the six. The OIG’s summary table shows that “USP McCreary and FCI Marianna had the greatest number of deficiencies,” and it concluded that McCreary’s “were the most significant of all the institutions we inspected.” FCC Allenwood and MCC Chicago had the fewest.

The Bureau’s answer is on the record too, and much of it is concrete. The broken freezer was repaired within two weeks and the rented trailers went back; “As of April 2025, the BOP reported that all of FCI Mendota’s freezers were operational.” Pallets were reorganized, six food carts now have working heaters, monthly pest inspections became routine, and staffing “improved to 76%, with a commitment to reaching 100% staffing soon.” On the x-ray machine, the response describes work still in progress: “a technician assessed the machine in May 2025, and parts are on order. In the meantime, FCI Mendota is resourcefully seeking comparable parts from other unused scanners.” That was eleven months after the inspection and roughly three years after the machine stopped working.

The 2024 PREA audit

FCI Mendota was audited under the Prison Rape Elimination Act on site from March 26–28, 2024, by an independent auditor, Valerie Wolfe Mahfood, working under PREA Auditors of America. The final report is dated May 12, 2024.

The facility passed, with six standards exceeded, 35 met, and none unmet. The six exceeded were zero tolerance and the PREA coordinator role, supervision and monitoring, volunteer and contractor training, inmate education, ongoing care for victims and abusers, and the frequency and scope of audits.

Designed capacity	1,280
Inmate housing units	14
Population on the audit’s first day	943
Average daily population, preceding 12 months	1,172 in one section of the form; 1,062 in another. The audit gives both
Over capacity in the preceding 12 months?	Yes
Staff who may have inmate contact	238
Volunteers / contractors with inmate contact	0 / 2
Limited English proficient, day one	817 of 943
Disclosed prior sexual victimization at screening	100

The audit recorded no volunteers with inmate contact in a prison that held 943 men on its first day in March 2024, although the Prisoner Visitation & Support program the chapel advertises depends on community volunteers. The 2024 audit also records that 100 men, one in nine, told the intake screener they had been sexually victimized before they arrived.

In the twelve months before the audit, the institution recorded four allegations of sexual abuse — one inmate-on-inmate, three staff-on-inmate — and three of sexual harassment. Every one was handled administratively; there were no criminal investigations. Of the four abuse allegations, one was ongoing at the time of the audit, one unfounded, one unsubstantiated, and none substantiated. The institution facilitated one forensic medical examination in the audit period, performed without cost by SAFE or SANE nursing staff.

What the sexual-abuse allegation counts do and do not show

In May 2026, the Government Accountability Office published per-institution counts of reported sexual-abuse allegations for every federal prison, covering 2020 to 2024, in Federal Prisons: Improvements Needed to Prevent, Detect, and Address Sexual Abuse, GAO-26-107343. For FCI Mendota the tables record eight allegations where the alleged perpetrator was another incarcerated person — one in 2020, none in 2021 or 2022, two in 2023, and five in 2024 — and thirteen where the alleged perpetrator was a Bureau employee: none in 2020, one in 2021, three in 2022, four in 2023, and five in 2024.

Four cautions apply to those numbers. They are allegations, not findings: GAO records that, from 2014 through 2022, “most allegations resulted in an unsubstantiated outcome, meaning there was not enough evidence to support the allegation did or did not occur,” and unsubstantiated does not mean false. The two counts come from different Bureau systems with different cutoff dates — inmate-perpetrator figures by year of incident as of August 2025, staff-perpetrator figures by year of report as of March 2025 — so thirteen and eight are not twenty-one. GAO does not adjust for population, so the counts cannot rank one prison against another: a large prison out-counts a small one at identical risk, and a low count can equally mean that allegations are not being reported. The staff figure also needs care: GAO’s table splits Mendota across two labels, “Mendota Federal Correctional Institution” and “Mendota Medium Federal Correctional Institution,” so a single row gives either 1 or 12 instead of 13.

Staffing

Staff shortages run through the inspection findings above, and the Bureau’s own labor record documents them.

On January 30, 2024, the Federal Labor Relations Authority decided a grievance brought by AFGE Local 1237 against this institution. Its opening description of the grievants reads: “The grievants are teachers in the Agency’s education department, and — as correctional officers — they also perform correctional duties.” That is augmentation: the teachers also work as correctional officers. An arbitrator had found the Bureau paid them the wrong overtime rate; the Authority denied one Bureau exception and remanded because the award contained no interpretation of the contract and no finding on exempt status. Nothing has been decided. (U.S. DOJ, Bureau of Prisons, FCI Mendota and AFGE Local 1237, 73 FLRA No. 154.)

A second case is pending. In Meyer v. United States, No. 25-cv-1535, the Court of Federal Claims described correctional officers at FCI Mendota suing for unpaid overtime covering “at least 15-30 minutes each shift” spent clearing the staff screening site in the lobby and passing through the Control Center sally port before their paid shift starts. On August 26, 2026, the court denied the government’s motion to dismiss those claims — a ruling about how the case was pleaded, not about whether the time is compensable. The case continues.

Local reporting fills in the scale. In May 2021, ABC30 in Fresno reported that “FCI Mendota houses 961 inmates with 261 people on staff,” and quoted the union president, Aaron McGlothin, saying “15 to 22 staff members per day are getting re-assigned to work in correctional officer posts” — and warning that “When you augment so many people away from their regular jobs, you are cutting down on the amount of staff available for an emergency response.”

Three years later, the Inspector General found the food service department staffed at 70 percent, and short staffing is what closes the camp kitchen and sends meals to the housing unit.

FCI Mendota in the news

Recent news about FCI Mendota centers on the officers’ unpaid-overtime case and a March 2026 walkaway from the camp; older items concern an officer’s arrest, a mail-exposure incident, methamphetamine thrown over the fence, a labor grievance, and two deaths in custody.

• August 2026 — the Court of Federal Claims refused to dismiss the officers’ unpaid-overtime claims for pre-shift screening and sally-port time (Meyer v. United States, No. 25-cv-1535).
• March 2026 — a walkaway from the satellite camp. Edgar Enriquez, 38, was found missing at about 9 p.m. on Sunday, March 22; the U.S. Marshals Service, the FBI, and other agencies were notified. He was serving 109 months imposed in the Southern District of California. There is no published report of a recapture.
• January 2026 — a correctional officer employed at the institution was arrested at the prison by Fresno police on charges of sexual offenses against two minors in the community, and police asked the public for help identifying further victims. These are charges, not convictions, and no outcome has been reported.
• May 2025 — two correctional officers distributing mail were taken to a hospital in Fresno after handling a piece of it and were released the same week. The Bureau said the matter remained under investigation and that “preliminary tests show no toxic substances were present.” The union said it was an illicit substance.
• May 2024 — a Fresno man was indicted for throwing more than three pounds of methamphetamine over the fence. “In broad daylight, Wheelen ran to the prison fence and tossed four packages into the prison’s recreation yard. He was quickly apprehended after attempting to flee.” The complaint records that none of the men in the yard picked the packages up. (U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of California.)
• January 2024 — the Federal Labor Relations Authority remanded the AFGE Local 1237 overtime grievance over education staff working correctional posts.
• September 2021 to January 2022 — the Bureau posted two news releases reporting the deaths of people held at FCI Mendota and its satellite camp; the Bureau’s releases are listed on its press release page.

Frequently asked questions about FCI Mendota

Problems at FCI Mendota: where we can help

FCI Mendota’s own records point to the problems that recur here. A food service department the Inspector General measured at 70 percent staffing, in a prison where the Bureau’s labor filings describe teachers working correctional posts. A camp kitchen that closes when staffing is short, so that men eat in the housing unit, where food waste has drawn rodents. Eighty-seven percent of the population recorded as limited English proficient, in a system that runs on written requests and thirty-day deadlines. And no residential drug program at this address, which puts up to a year of sentence reduction out of reach without a transfer.

• RDAP referral and transfer. With no residential program here, the § 3621(e) year depends on being screened and redesignated in time, and the handbook’s own window opens 48 to 24 months before release. For a Spanish-speaking man the shortlist is shorter still: the Bureau runs Spanish-language RDAP at two institutions, neither in California.
• First Step Act time credits that are not being earned because a SPARC-13 survey was never opened on TRULINCS. The Bureau treats that as opting out, and the credits stop regardless of eligibility.
• Designation and transfer — whether someone is at the FCI or the camp, and whether he can be moved nearer home, turns on security points, Public Safety Factors, and a Management Variable.
• Medical care and accommodations. A lower-bunk or soft-shoe pass issued at another institution is void here and has to be rewritten. Where treatment is not happening, the route runs through written requests and then the administrative remedy process, which has a clock on every rung; where negligence has caused injury, see Federal Tort Claims Act claims.
• Valley fever exposure for anyone immunosuppressed or being treated for HIV or cancer. The institution’s own handbook identifies the risk; a designation or redesignation request is the place to raise it.
• Language access. A man who cannot read an incident report, a program review, or a remedy form in English is at a disadvantage the deadlines do not forgive, and the Bureau’s own LanguageLine arrangements can be invoked by name.
• Disciplinary proceedings that threaten good conduct time, and SHU placements that outlast their justification, including protective custody requests that become open-ended segregation.
• Halfway house and home confinement placement, and errors in the sentence computation itself, measured against the Bureau’s sentence computation manual.
• Reporting sexual abuse. The Justice Department’s own TRULINCS mailbox is untraceable at the institution but only reaches the Inspector General on weekdays; the remedy route and a direct letter are alternatives.
• Challenges to the conviction or sentence itself, through a direct appeal or a § 2255 motion.

Elizabeth Franklin-Best, P.C. handles federal criminal defense, appeals and post-conviction matters nationwide, and advises families on Bureau of Prisons issues at institutions across the system. Call (843) 620-1100 or contact us to talk through a specific situation.

Christopher Zoukis, JD, MBA, the firm’s Managing Director, writes and maintains the federal prison policy material on this site. He is not counsel of record; legal representation is provided by Elizabeth Franklin-Best.

Sources and currency

Bureau of Prisons documents

• FCI Mendota, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. The Bureau’s page for the institution.
• FCI/SPC Mendota Admission and Orientation Handbook, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2025.
• Guía de Admisión y Orientación, FCI Mendota, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2025. The Spanish edition of the handbook.
• Visiting Regulations, Institution Supplement MEN 5267.09C, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2025. Replaced Institution Supplement MEN 5267.09B (2021).
• Regulaciones de Visitas, Institution Supplement MEN 5267.09C, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2025. The Spanish edition of the supplement.
• FCI Mendota Commissary Shopping List, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2023.
• Trust Fund/Deposit Fund Manual, Program Statement 4500.13, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Sets the commissary spending limit.
• Inmate Telephone Regulations, Program Statement 5264.09, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2026. Replaced Program Statement 5264.08 (2008).
• First Step Act Approved Programs Guide, Federal Bureau of Prisons, Reentry Services Division, 2026. Program locations and the RDAP locations list.
• Press Releases, Federal Bureau of Prisons, 2021.

Audits and inspections

• Inspection of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ U.S. Penitentiary Canaan (Report 26-055), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2026. Gives the number of institutions the Inspector General has inspected since 2023.
• Federal Prisons: Improvements Needed to Prevent, Detect, and Address Sexual Abuse (GAO-26-107343), U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2026.
• Concurrent Inspections of BOP Food Service Operations (Report 25-062), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2025.
• PREA Facility Audit Report: FCI Mendota, PREA Auditors of America, 2024. Auditor Valerie Wolfe Mahfood.
• Federal Bureau of Prisons Annual Financial Statements Fiscal Year 2012 (Report 13-09), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2013.
• Audit of the Federal Bureau of Prisons Annual Financial Statements Fiscal Year 2011 (Report 12-09), U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the Inspector General, 2012.

Court records

• Meyer v. United States, No. 25-cv-1535, U.S. Court of Federal Claims, 2026.
• Fresno Man Indicted for Throwing Methamphetamine into Mendota Prison Yard, U.S. Attorney’s Office, Eastern District of California, 2024. Wheelen’s indictment.
• U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Prisons, FCI Mendota and AFGE Local 1237, 73 FLRA No. 154, Federal Labor Relations Authority, 2024.
• United States v. Kopp, 562 F.3d 141 (2d Cir. 2009), U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, 2009.

News and other sources

• Inmate missing from satellite camp near prison in Mendota, KMPH, 2026.
• Mendota prison officer arrested after alleged sex crimes as victim walked to school, KSEE/KGPE (YourCentralValley.com), 2026.
• Mendota Mental Health Institute, Wisconsin Department of Health Services, 2026.
• Officers exposed to contaminated mail at Mendota prison, officials say, ABC30 (KFSN, Fresno), 2025.
• Teachers, plumbers, nurses forced to guard inmates at Mendota prison, ABC30 (KFSN, Fresno), 2021.
• Capital Asset Plan and Business Case Summary, Exhibit 300: FCI Mendota, CA, U.S. Department of Justice, 2011.
• 18 U.S.C. § 248, Freedom of access to clinic entrances, U.S. Code (Legal Information Institute).
• 18 U.S.C. § 3621(e), Imprisonment of a convicted person, U.S. Code (Legal Information Institute).

Sources reviewed September 2026.

Reviewed for legal accuracy by Elizabeth Franklin-Best, Esq., Principal Attorney·September 2026