• Level I housing ("Open dormitories without a secure perimeter").
• Level III housing ("Individual cells, fenced perimeters and armed coverage").
• Level IV housing ("Cells, fenced or walled perimeters, electronic security, more staff and armed officers both inside and outside the installation").
• Security Housing Units, "the most secure area[s] within a Level IV prison designed to provide maximum coverage." Among these units is the Protective Housing Unit which holds up to 47 prisoners who require "extraordinary protection from other prisoners" The Protective Housing Unit has been described as "strikingly calm" because inmates "don't want to be moved somewhere less guarded.", the facility opened in 1988. The prison hospital was dedicated in October 1993.
     A front-page article by Mark Arax in the August 1996 Los Angeles Times claimed that COR was "the most troubled of the 32 state prisons." At the time, COR officers had shot and killed more inmates "than any prison in the country" in COR's eight years of existence; based on interviews and documents, Arax concluded that many shootings of prisoners were "not justified" and that in some cases "the wrong inmate was killed by mistake."
     A March 1997 episode of the CBS show 60 Minutes discussed the 1994 death, "the alleged cover-up and the alarming number of shootings at the prison." The California Department of Corrections issued the results of its own investigation in November 1997, which found "isolated incidents of staff misconduct" but no "'widespread staff conspiracy' to abuse prisoners."
     A film entitled "Maximum Security University," which used prison surveillance tapes showing four 1989-1993 fights "end[ing] when a guard fatally shoots a combatant," was released in February 1998. That month, eight California correctional officers and supervisors were indicted "on federal criminal civil rights charges in connection with inmate fights that occurred at Corcoran State Prison in 1994". After a trial, the eight men were "acquitted of all charges" in June 2000.
     Subsequently, COR has been featured in at least two episodes of MSNBC's Lockup series: "Inside Corcoran" (which first aired as early as 2003) and "Return to Corcoran" (which first aired in 2005).

  Notable inmates

  The prison's most prominent inmates include:
  
• Juan Vallejo Corona, who murdered 25 people in 1971. He was transferred to COR from the Correctional Training Facility in 1992 and now lives in COR's Protective Housing Unit. He has an automatic parole hearing every six years, the most recent in February 2007.
• Charles Manson, who was transferred from San Quentin State Prison to COR in March 1989. In May 2007 he was denied parole and won't be eligible for release again until 2012. He lives in COR's Protective Housing Unit.
• Sirhan Sirhan, convicted assassin of United States Senator Robert F. “Bobby” Kennedy. He was transferred to COR from the Correctional Training Facility in 1992 and lived in COR's Protective Housing Unit until he was moved to a harsher lockdown [atCOR] in 2003.

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