San Diego’s Garbage Bin for Humans, aka the County Jail, Needs to Be Fixed
Now we know why San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore opted for an early retirement; his last day coincided with the release of a blistering State Auditor’s report on practices at the County jails.
The 126 page report, which called for the legislature to intervene to force the Sheriff’s Department to make changes, served to confirm observations made over the past nine years by reporters Dave Maass, Kelly Davis, and Jeff McDonald.
Citizen activists with the North County Standing Up for Racial Justice, the Racial Justice Coalition and the North County Equity & Justice Coalition applied political pressure leading up to a call for an audit by local legislators.
With 185 deaths –including 52 suicides–over a 15 year period, in what amounts to cruel and unusual practices at local jails, have led to 22 lawsuits by families desperate to gain closure over the loss of a loved one.
From Times of San Diego:
“San Diego County has settled 11 of these, for a total cost of $9.2 million,” the audit said. “Payments for these cases ranged from $10,000 to $3.5 million for an average of $838,000 per settlement.”
The Sheriff department’s internal watchdog, the Critical Incident Review Board, according to the report, was dismissed as ineffective:
“The primary focus of this board is protecting the Sheriff’s Department against potential litigation rather than focusing on improving the health and welfare of incarcerated individuals”
As reports in the media surfaced in recent years, the Sheriff’s Department challenged facts and methodologies, going so far as to attempt (unsuccessfully) to subpoena Kelly Davis’ notes and interviews in 2017.
From the Union-Tribune:
The long-anticipated report took the unusual step of rebutting the department’s response to the audit. State auditors called parts of the response “disingenuous” and raised questions about the department’s internal controls.
The auditors said San Diego County jails can only be fixed by legislation requiring the Sheriff’s Department to implement a series of recommendations spelled out in the 126-page report.
“Given the ongoing risk to the safety of incarcerated individuals, the Sheriff’s Department’s inadequate response to deaths and the lack of effective independent oversight, we believe the Legislature must take action to ensure that the Sheriff’s Department implements meaningful change,” the report said.
The county’s Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board, or CLERB, a volunteer panel created in the early 1990s after a public vote to improve oversight of the Sheriff’s and Probation departments came under fire in the report.
Auditors said CLERB has not always provided effective and independent oversight of the Sheriff’s Department and had failed to prioritize investigations of in-custody deaths.
Among other things, the audit said, the citizens’ review board wrongly allows department employees to avoid interviews with investigators and instead bases its findings on written responses to questions.
The oversight board also systematically dismissed 22 death investigations in 2017 — 16 jail deaths and six deaths during the process of arrest — due to a backlog that pushed the cases past a one-year deadline, auditors said.
CLERB said it was taking some steps to implement all the auditor’s recommendations. The Deputy Sheriff’s Association has entered into negotiations to allow in-person interviews with sworn personnel, and the County Board of Supervisors has been asked to increase the panel’s oversight authority to include jail medical staff.
The position of County Sheriff is up for election in the fall midterms. Should none of the four currently declared candidates fail to get a majority of votes in the June primary, the top two candidates will face off in the fall.
The lead up to this election provides the most substantial opportunity for citizens to question the status quo.
Undersheriff Kelly Martinez, Former Sheriff’s Commander Dave Myers, Assistant City Attorney John Hemerling, and sheriff’s Deputy Kenneth Newsom are vying for the job.
Martinez has the inside track, having been endorsed by her former boss and a gaggle of local Democratic politicians. Myers, who ran unsuccessfully for the job in 2018, has been picking up endorsements from Democratic clubs throughout the county. Hemerling is apparently the choice of local Republicans. Newsom represents a faction of Sheriffs resistant to change.
Dave Myers has been the only candidate willing to openly criticize the department, and he’s paying the price as establishment candidates don’t want to be seen as weak on crime.
Crime, after all, has been turned into a defining issue in the midterms nationally. Supposedly, the nation is facing a massive spike in unlawful activities, and critics of reforms to incarceration policies have been doing their damndest to paint a picture of streets gone wild populated by vicious criminals newly released from prisons and jails.
The political choices we have, as defined by mainstream pundits, are defunding the police or getting tough on crime by locking more people up.
And that second choice gets to the heart of the matter, as statistics are misrepresented and manipulated by law enforcement agencies. The best example of his sort of distortions would be the spike in homicides here in California.
From CalMatters (which covers other crime indicators in its reporting):
The headlines blared that homicides were up 31% in California in 2020. That’s true, but it doesn’t tell the whole story.
A long-range look at crime statistics, particularly homicide data, shows that the 2020 crime rate nationally and in California was still a fraction of its highs in the early 1990s, according to government statistics.
The jump between 2019 and 2020 became a central aspect of the unsuccessful recall of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Republican Larry Elder, the leading vote-getter among Newsom’s challengers, decried the “soft-on-crime ethos that we see emanating from Sacramento and from many of our major cities.” Kevin Faulconer, another Newsom challenger, said the rising crime rate forced major employers to pull out of San Francisco.
The Soft on Crime representations conveniently leave out any possibility of a relationship with record levels of gun sales.
A higher percentage of people were killed by firearms in 2020 than in any year since at least 2011.
Of those, nearly half were killed by a handgun. The number is almost certainly higher, since 23% of all firearm homicides reported by police did not specify or could not determine the type of firearm used.
Even if San Diego’s jails weren’t being scrutinized for bad practices, the question of what purpose locking people up serves remains.
Sometimes they are used to detain people awaiting trial who are deemed a flight risk or a danger to public safety. And even that purpose needs to have the qualifier of “poor people, likely Black and Brown’ added to it.
In San Diego, jails have served as the place of last resort for homeless humans. Roughly 40% of the jail’s population were homeless at the time of arrest, according to a SANDAG report. Nearly two thirds of inmates interviewed told researchers they’d experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.
Jails everywhere have also become the government entity used to address severe mental illness.
From a 2019 Union-Tribune report:
Almost one in three San Diego County jail inmates is prescribed medication to treat mental illness, making Sheriff Bill Gore one of the most prolific providers of behavioral health services in the region.
Last year alone, Gore spent more than $5.6 million on pharmaceutical drugs for the 5,600 or so people behind bars on any given day — approximately $1,000 per inmate, or one-fifth of the sheriff’s entire budget for medical, dental, psychiatric and other contracted health care services….
…The state hospital system today serves fewer than 12,000 mentally ill patients in five facilities. Most of them are criminal referrals, meaning they were ordered into treatment until competent to stand trial.
This is one of those “everybody knows” situations, including some variation of the story that [insert name of politician] closed all the mental hospitals and put people on the street.
As Alisa Roth explained in a recent Atlantic article, the reality is more complicated than that pat answer suggests:
But the theory falls apart on closer scrutiny. It’s not the case that the majority of people with mental illness were suddenly on the streets when institutions closed: Even in 1950, only about a third of people with mental illness were living in psychiatric hospitals and other facilities. More than half already lived in communities, with family or on their own.
Furthermore, the vast majority of incarcerated people with mental illness belong to a subset of the population that likely would never have been served by state psychiatric hospitals in the past. State-hospital patients were largely white and middle-aged or older, and divided roughly evenly between men and women; today’s incarcerated population is largely young, male, and not white. (More than half of the U.S. prison population are people of color.) One study suggests that closing the state psychiatric facilities increased the incarcerated population by less than 10 percent...
…It’s easy to think that if people with mental illness could be housed and treated in asylums or similar institutions, they wouldn’t be policed and incarcerated at such high rates. But it’s important to remember that those hospitals had deteriorated to conditions shockingly similar to today’s worst correctional facilities. Instead, we need to face head-on the enormous problems of mass incarceration and a system of mental-health care that effectively does not exist. No nostalgic looking back will change that.
To San Diego County’s credit, the Board of Supervisors has been taking steps to expand services, including creation of mobile teams of mental health professionals dedicated to responding to people in crisis instead of sending police officers and sheriff’s deputies.
The number of funded positions for health care providers in San Diego County’s jails is being increased, a not-easy sell in the middle of a pandemic, where many law enforcement officers working in jails refuse to get vaccinated..
Undoing decades of neglect and reorienting the criminal justice system toward anything other than punishment is a tough slog. The county’s Behavioral Health Services perennially fails to spend all of the money it has been awarded and the reasons for that problem (not caring administrators, I bet) need to be addressed.
An NPR story on mental illness and incarceration says that in Los Angeles County jail costs almost five times more than the kind of inpatient housing needed for people having mental health issues. It also has, so far, a much lower recidivism rate than their county jail.
A big part of the solution to San Diego’s jail problems is finding a sheriff who can balance the need for safety in the community alongside the understanding that much of what his officers see are health problems.
Email me at WritetoDougPorter@Gmail.com