California IN BRIEF : CHOWCHILLA : Inmates Help Create Sacramento Mural

Six women convicts will help make a large mural depicting Sacramento’s history that will be placed on the city’s downtown pedestrian mall. The Central California Women’s Facility inmates will stay inside the prison walls near Chowchilla to do their work, however. The women are part of the first artistic project to win a contract between private industry and the California Department of Corrections. Anne Whitehurst, a Los Banos artist, won a commission over other leading California muralists to make an 8-by-96-foot mural showing highlights of Sacramento’s history dating to the Gold Rush. Whitehurst will draw the design for the mural and has hired the six inmates to paint it. After the mural is painted, it will be moved in eight-foot sections to Sacramento, where it will be assembled on the K Street Mall just west of the Capitol. The prisoners are expected to start the painting under Whitehurst’s direction in about three weeks. The women are among 100 prisoners around the state working for nine companies on such private-sector work as data processing, recycling, telephone answering and making security glass, signs or cookies.