Kudos to Laurence Severance and Gail Osherenko for their sharp and sensible critique of Santa Barbara County’s misguided jail expansion (“Limit Jail Expansion Now,” March 6). They’ve laid out a simple truth: building more jail beds won’t make us safer — it will just make us poorer.
The numbers don’t lie. With crime trends declining and our jails already overstuffed with people who shouldn’t be there — those too poor to make bail, those struggling with mental illness — why double down on failure? Sheriff Brown’s push for 1,008 beds is not just fiscally reckless but morally bankrupt. More cells mean more suffering, more wasted tax dollars, and no real solutions to the problems that land people in jail in the first place.
Imagine if we spent that money on housing, mental health services, and job training instead of perpetuating cycles of incarceration. Real public safety isn’t built with bars and bunk beds — it’s built with stable communities, treatment, and opportunity.
Severance and Osherenko have the right idea: let’s stop funding jails like they’re the future and start funding solutions that actually work. The Board of Supervisors should listen to the people — not the prison-industrial complex.
