READ IT AND WEEP: There’s a line I find myself stumbling over these days: “I contain multitudes.” I like it. Naturally, I figured it came from the Bible. It has all the Bible’s murky poetic grandeur. It turns out, it was Walt Whitman — one of America’s first dazzlingly epic poets. (And by the way, yes, he was gay.) The complete line Whitman wrote is: “I am large. I contain multitudes.” And that’s preceded by “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.”
I’ve been feeling especially contradictory and multitudinous these last few weeks. Maybe that’s because I’ve spent the better part of four days watching the county supervisors and all the county’s 23 department heads come to terms with how many widows and orphans they’ll have to throw overboard when they pass their budget this June. The answer? A whole lot. We’re talking about cutting $70 million and eliminating more than 400 full-time positions. (Spoiler alert: Yes, it’s all Trump’s fault. But it’s the California legislature’s, too.)
Against this grim backdrop, the supes simultaneously found themselves going toe-to-toe with Sheriff Bill Brown over pretty much everything.
First: the size of the new North County Jail that needs to be built. The talk is about “housing pods.” Brown insists nothing fewer than two new ones will do. Translated into English, that’s 512 new beds, bringing the total number of beds under lock and key to 1,008. All that will cost $212 million to build. (And yes, I do have a bridge to sell you.) Amortized over time, that will add $15 million to the county’s financial obligations.
Initially, a majority of the supervisors and the county’s powers-that-be thought they could get by with just one new pod, limiting the total jail system capacity to 752, which — when population safety formulas are factored in — translates to 639.
Ultimately, the supervisors indicated a willingness to cut the baby in half at 1.5 new pods. But in actuality, Brown got the much bigger half, though not before about 37 mental health and criminal justice reform advocates — many wearing their signature red scarves, which I never really understood — showed up and made what, in the moment, I thought was an utterly convincing case for more mental health beds, not new jail cells.
Full disclosure — I pretend no dispassionate neutrality here. I got good and humid when the mother of a 41-year-old schizophrenic testified how her son has showed up to court 160 times for 20 separate cases, mostly involving petty theft, for which he’s served more than 300 days — and nights — behind bars at the county jail. It’s a zero-sum game, she argued. The more jail cells you build, she argued, the less money’s left over for mental health care.
Most every family in America can tell some variant of this same story. I had a mentally ill uncle — back when they still called bipolar disorder manic depression — who got violent when jazz guitar player Charlie Byrd refused to play his hit song “The Girl from Ipanema” one more time. My uncle, a bowling ball of a man, wasn’t that big but was a handful and got arrested. When he would visit the family, us kids found him hilarious. The older relatives had a decidedly different experience. Not long after his arrest, my uncle threw himself over a bridge. Nobody was laughing when he died. But there was a guilty, unstated sense of relief.
Over the years, I’ve sat across too many tables from too many parents of too many mentally ill adult children. They were drowning on dry land. So, when Sheriff Bill Brown argued, as he did during this newest jail sizing debate, that jails were places where people could hit bottom safely and start to turn their lives around, I bristled. That nostrum may well be true for alcoholics and drug addicts — and alcohol certainly made my uncle more jolly — but it’s totally irrelevant when considering the neurochemical shit shows that afflict the mentally ill and consume their families.
So no, I don’t wear a red scarf. But I may as well.
Beds, not cells.
Of course, it’s never quite that simple. Yes, 33 people in the county jail now have court orders decreeing they should be placed in treatment. Guess what? No room at the inn. So, they wait. Yes, about 45 percent of the people in county jail are taking serious psychotropic drugs, suggesting how prevalent serious mental illness is in there. That number could well be an exaggeration; the medications prescribed for medically assisted addiction treatment — with which the jail is making great strides — is also a psychotropic medication.
I must highlight that 32 new treatment beds are slated to be built on the north county jail campus sometime in 2029. This is not a lockdown facility for people with 5150 designations. These are voluntary beds. They are not long-term beds, more like longish — up to 30 days. Still, they’re new beds.
Part of the problem here is that Bill Brown has limited credibility when he talks dollars and cents. Off the record, every county supervisor will tell you what a great human being Brown actually is, but in the same breath, they will also tell you what a terrible administrator he is.
Last year, his department’s overtime cost-overruns exceeded $20 million. This year, it’s already hit the $9 million mark. His budget consumes one-third of the county’s general fund. Every other grand jury report seems to be about overspending at the county jail. Or how the jail’s private medical service provider probably charged the county $3.5 million for work not done or how Brown never blew the whistle about this or even issued one sanction.
Supervisors like Joan Hartmann can quote these issues chapter and verse. What about the meal carts the department purchased that were too wide to be wheeled down the halls. The list goes on. Little wonder Hartmann proposed the creation of an inspector general’s department just to bird-dog the sheriff’s spending. As proposed, it would be given the power to subpoena documents and staff.
Hartmann’s idea belly-flopped this week. Such a costly initiative in the face of draconian budget cuts was a deal killer. But the supervisors did vote 3-2 to endorse a proposed state bill giving county governments the option to appoint someone other than the sheriff to run their county jails. Clearly, this bill was aimed at Brown. The bill’s author, Assemblymember Gregg Hart, served two terms on the board of supervisors.
None of the supervisors believe Brown is lying about costs; they just don’t believe he knows. Brown moves through the world with genuine graciousness coupled with the unshakable certainty of someone who’s always right. And he’s been elected five times. That’s a record. He’s never faced a credible challenge. He got the new North County Jail built, a genuine accomplishment that stymied his predecessors. Along the way, he’s served as head of both state and sheriffs’ associations. It’s hard to argue with that history of success.
Here’s the bad news. The top two county administrators — Mona Miyasato and Tanja Heitman — and Tracy Macuga, head of the Public Defender’s office, are all soon to retire. They have all focused 90 percent of their considerable cranial capacity trying to keep the mentally ill, the addicted, and the low-level offenders out of county jail. That’s a massive brain drain.
Here’s the good news. Brown’s new undersheriff, Brad Welch, is smart, competent, and seems genuinely intent in solving problems that, in the past, seemed to not be taken seriously. In just four months at his post, Welch has wowed supervisors with his directness and openness.
Hey, it’s a start.
And no, I’m not particularly large, but yes — thank you, Walt Whitman — I too contain multitudes. At times, I wish some of them would just shut the hell up.
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