[2][3][4] In addition, the Fresno County Sheriff's Department also runs a Satellite Jail located two miles away from the main facility.

[2][3] Correctional officers say the three largest security threat groups are the Fresno Bulldogs, Norteños, and Sureños.

[2][3][4] All housing units in this Annex consist of dormitory style living with detainees sleeping in bunk beds in an open area.

[2][3][4] The majority of the South Annex Jail consists of dormitory style living with the exception of 17 separate cells housing high security lockdown offenders.

[8][9] On November 15, 2015, David Riggens, a 19-year-old sex offender, switched his identification bracelet with another inmate who was due to be released that day and walked out of the jail after being mistakenly identified.

[13][14] At 8:30 a.m. Thong Vang walked into the Fresno County Jail lobby and shot two correctional officers with a handgun before being subdued.

[14] In January 2018, Ernest Brock, Lorenzo Herera, and Andre Erkins were booked into the Fresno County Jail in a 48-hour stretch.

Within three days Brock was beaten into a coma, and not two months after that, Herera was strangled to death and Erkins died of cardiac arrest, alone in his cell.

[2][17][18][19] The Bulldogs are the most violent of any group, while maintaining control of being the largest gang in the Fresno County Jail.

[2][18] To combat the severely overcrowded conditions, growing gang violence, and increase in inmate disturbances, the Fresno County Sheriff's Department Jail Division created the Security Emergency Response and Tactics (SERT) Team in 1983.

[20][8] Another reason the department created the team was because fires in the downtown facilities had become an almost routine occurrence, and firefighter attempts to extinguish the flames were thwarted by the adverse actions of inmates throwing objects and blowing darts through jail-made blowguns.