For six hours, the county supervisors agonized over what might turn out to be one of the most expensive lose-lose propositions in county supervisorial history pitting a well-organized roomful of energized mental-health advocates against Sheriff Bill Brown — who was as imposing at the podium as usual — over a massive makeover of the county’s system of county jails.
The supervisors voted 3-2 to spend more than $200 million on a massive jail construction and remodel project that will dramatically reduce the number of jail beds at the county’s old and dysfunctional main jail off of Calle Real while dramatically expanding the number of beds up in the new North County Jail. All this will cost about $15 million a year over 30 years, which eats significantly into revenue the supervisors said they’d much rather spend on anything else and which — depending on the condition of the economy — will push county coffers into a significantly deep hole.
At issue Tuesday was how many total jail beds the supervisors needed to approve in order to be operationally safe for the anticipated number of inmates and custodial staff, while also satisfying the settlement terms of a class action lawsuit filed against the county over jail subpar conditions by Disability Rights California.
When it came to number of beds, the supervisors voted for an in-between compromise number — 876 — that satisfied neither Sheriff Brown nor the mental health advocates and their allies on the board. Typically, the jail population hovers at about 750, but this Tuesday it was reported to be 810, an unusually high number. Brown said jails need a 15 percent safety buffer of additional bed space so that prisoners can be safely classified and segregated from each other to minimize violence. That would bring the total number of beds needed to more than 900.
Mental-health advocates urged the supervisors to delay action and appoint a task force to aggressively explore how to keep people out of jail in the first place by getting them into mental health or substance abuse diversion programs. Mentally ill people only get worse in jail, they argued; what they needed were treatment beds not jail beds.
Although supervisors Laura Capps and Joan Hartmann wanted even fewer beds, they voted against the mental-health advocates — with whom they largely agreed — because of a construction deadline imposed by the legal settlement. That settlement didn’t allow any such task force sufficient time to arrive at any achievable recommendations. And besides, they lamented, the data they would have to rely upon about who’s in the jail, how many are mentally ill, and how many are addicted to various substances appears to be highly contradictory. Likewise for the number of diversion programs currently available and how effective they actually are.
Supervisors Hartmann and Capps wanted to push for an even lower number of beds — 748 — in hopes that the shortage would force all the criminal-justice-involved and law enforcement agencies to take diversion more seriously than they currently are. Supervisors Steve Lavagnino and Bob Nelson wanted to build for a 1,004-bed capacity based on Brown’s numbers showing the demand over time warranted them. Ultimately, it was new Supervisor Roy Lee who crafted the in-between compromise. He initially wanted 128 of the beds set aside for inmates with mental health issues. Ultimately, he agreed to replace the number 128 with the word “maximize.”
