‘Bleak House’ Case over Jail Overcrowding Settles After 45 Years

It might not be quite as long as Charles Dickens’s epic courtroom novel Bleak House, about England’s longest-running court case, but this last week, criminal defense attorney Robert Sanger and Santa Barbara County agreed to drop a 45-year case about conditions at the jail.

In 1981, Sanger sued the county, claiming that it was running a jail that was overcrowded and dangerous. Inmates were routinely sleeping on the floor, bugs were in the food, blankets were allowed to be placed over the bars so guards couldn’t see into the cells, and there were little to no medical and mental health services. The conditions, Sanger contended, posed a danger to inmates and guards alike.

Sanger was 32 years old when he first filed the case; today, he’s 77. Over the decades, Sanger conferred about the case with four sheriffs — John Carpenter, Jim Thomas, Jim Anderson, and Bill Brown — five judges, one of whom regularly urged him to be more aggressive — and countless county counsels. Along the way, he served on two task forces convened by two sheriffs to address chronic overcrowding at the jail.

Sanger is under few illusions that all is now well — or even acceptable at the county jail. He has described jailhouse medical care as hellacious. But he and the county counsel agreed to dismiss the case because floor sleepers ceased to be an issue since the new North County Jail opened in 2022. Even so, he doubts the new jail has offered much of a solution. He favors early intervention programs that keep people charged with nonthreatening offenses out of jail in the first place. “If you build it, they will just fill it,” he said.

In recent years, the average daily population at the jail has hovered between 750 and 800. During COVID, it dipped into the 600s. Before 2016, however, it was regularly around 1,200. Because of the legal pressure Sanger — one of Santa Barbara’s best-known defense attorneys — brought to bear, jail administrators were forced to become more amenable to early release for certain inmates; many were released without bail on their own recognizance, otherwise known as OR. He expressed pride that for a number of years the jail was home to a sobering center where those with addiction issues could address their demons.

Sanger said the older jail was overcrowded the day it opened back in 1972. It was initially designed, he claimed, to withstand a possible onslaught of UCSB students, politically jacked up by the revolutionary fervor popular in the early 1970s. It was not designed, he said, with the day-to-day sight lines required by any normally functioning jail. Even before he passed the bar, he said, he was appalled by the lack of toilets, showers, and basic amenities a jail needs. “It was so out of whack, I couldn’t believe it.” 

When his clients complained of conditions behind bars, Sanger said he was eager to sue. The problem, he said, was that none of his incarcerated clients were eager to get on the wrong side of jail authorities. It was only when he encountered Dennis Boyd Miller, a hit man from Washington State who shot and killed a noted South African sculptor — and diamond smuggler — plus the sculptor’s girlfriend and his business partner. Miller was looking at a possible death penalty sentence and had nothing to lose. “Sure, I’ll do it,” Sanger recalls Miller saying.

Miller, who eventually died in Folsom State Prison after serving 30 years, provided Sanger’s case the necessary spark. But it was three custody officers, all sergeants, who turned the tide. One sergeant approached Sanger, telling him if he subpoenaed her, she’d testify how dangerous the place was for both prisoners and inmates. She also gave him the names of two other sergeants who would do the same. When all three showed up in the courtroom, Sanger recalled, the attorney representing the county was taken aback. 

“What are they doing here?” he asked. 

“They’re my witnesses,” Sanger replied.

“Can I have a word with them?” the attorney asked.

With Sanger’s blessing, they met and conferred. After that, the county counsel notified Sanger, “We’re willing to stipulate that conditions in the jail are unconstitutional.” At the time, Sanger recalled thinking, “That was easy.” For the next 40 years, however, he would bang his head against the wall, trying to find agreement with what the remedies should be. There was always something — health care access, phone access, food remedies — and, of course, people sleeping on mattresses on the floor. 

In the early days, some of those mattresses were located in close proximity to the nearest urinal. One judge, Sanger said, frequently urged him to throw the book at the jail administrators. Another judge, furious he might find himself forced to micromanage the jail, lit into the county representatives, angrily ordering them to get their act together. 

Even with the dismissal of Sanger’s case, all is hardly rosy at the county jail. With much of the South County jail destined for demolition, the new North County jail is poised for a massive public works project — with all the massive public works costs attached — to build new pods, cells, and beds. At a time when the county is projecting $66 million in deficits over the next 10 years, the projected costs are astronomical; the actual costs once construction starts will be even more so. 

Sanger’s dismissal notwithstanding, the county jail remains the focus of serious litigation. In 2017, the jail was hit with a major lawsuit by a disability rights group alleging excessive use of solitary confinement, mistreatment of people with disabilities, and an abject dereliction of duty when it came to mental health care. Although that lawsuit settled in 2021, the settlement requires a host of major infrastructure improvements and programmatic reforms, all of which are closely monitored to ensure fidelity and adherence and all of which are very expensive. 

If worse comes to worst, Sanger said, he can always file another legal action. In the meantime, he said that when people tell him, “‘That’s something you did,’ I say, ‘It’s my life.’”