The statistics paint a picture of institutional strain. As of April 2020, Centinela held 3,284 inmates in a facility designed for 2,308 - an occupancy rate of 142.3 percent. The staff numbered 1,266 as of fiscal year 2007/2008, operating on an annual budget of $161 million. These numbers place Centinela among California's chronically overcrowded correctional facilities, though it never reached the extremes of Avenal State Prison, which by 2007 had become the state system's most packed institution. The mathematics of incarceration in California has long been a story of too many people in too little space.

The prison's location in Imperial County places it in one of America's most unforgiving landscapes. The desert heat isn't just uncomfortable - it's potentially lethal. In August 2006, a quadriplegic inmate died after the air conditioning failed in a transport van traveling from Corcoran to Centinela. The federal official overseeing medical care in California's prison system called the death "proof of a broken system." The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation described it as "a terrible event caused by happenstance." The disagreement illuminated a larger debate about conditions inside California's prisons, where temperature, healthcare, and basic safety intersected with budget constraints and political priorities.

Centinela's prisoner rolls have included names that made headlines. John Leonard Orr, the fire captain turned serial arsonist whose fires killed four people and caused millions in damage, served time here. Damian Williams, one of the attackers who beat truck driver Reginald Denny during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, passed through Centinela before being released, then reincarcerated for murder in 2000. Earlonne Woods, who became an acclaimed podcaster and author while incarcerated, was held at Centinela before transferring to San Quentin and eventually being released. Each name represents a different thread in California's complex tapestry of crime, punishment, and occasional redemption.

In January 1996, the administration of Governor Pete Wilson used Centinela as a test case for federal immigration enforcement in state prisons. Wilson's officials asked Immigration and Naturalization Service agents to take custody of a 25-year-old undocumented immigrant serving time for drug offenses. The INS agents refused, creating a standoff between state and federal authority that foreshadowed decades of immigration policy debates. The prisoner remained at Centinela. The legal and political questions Wilson raised that day continue to echo through American corrections policy, unresolved and contentious, while the Sentinel Mountain watches silently from across the border.