9 Hospitalized after 200 Prisoners Riot in Southern Calif.

Eight corrections officers and an incarcerated man were injured in a riot involving about 200 inmates in the recreational yard of a Southern California prison, authorities said Thursday.

The violence erupted about 10 a.m. local time Wednesday as officers were escorting an inmate across the yard as part of a contraband investigation at Ironwood State Prison in Blythe, according to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The inmate headbutted a staff member, and as he was being subdued, "approximately 200 incarcerated people [in] the yard rushed toward the officers attacking them with fists and rocks," the department said in a statement.

After deploying a rifle warning round, officers used "chemical agents and nonlethal impact rounds" to get the melee under control, the statement said.

Eight staff members and one incarcerated person were treated at an outside hospital and later returned to the prison, officials said. The extent of their injuries wasn't available.

So far, 30 incarcerated people have been identified as having direct involvement in the riot, and the investigation is ongoing.

Movement was restricted in yards and dayrooms at all prisons statewide for 24 hours as officials conducted a routine threat assessment.

Ironwood, a minimum-medium security facility in the desert east of Los Angeles, opened in 1994 and houses about 2,500 male inmates.

The past few months have been a particularly violent time for California prisons, including a recent sexual assault of a staffer at Sierra Conservation Center in Jamestown and a number of homicides across the state.

Many of the killings have been attributed to problems within the Mexican Mafia prison gang and its subsidiaries in the wake of the July 2023 fatal stabbing of a member named Michael "Mosca" Torres, who was at California State Prison, Sacramento, awaiting trial in a federal racketeering case.