Santa Barbara Supervisors Approve $167M for North County Jail Addition, Tolling Death Knell for Old Jail

In a decision that will grow more momentous in hindsight than it did in the moment, the county supervisors voted unanimously — with one member absent — to spend $167 million to build six additional housing units (or one-and-a-half new “pods”) while paving the way to shut down all but a small portion of South County’s Main Jail. All this new housing is supposed to happen by 2029. 

A coalition of criminal-justice reformers and mental-health advocates showed up to urge the supervisors to pause and build only four new housing units for the Northern Branch Jail. The average daily population of the two facilities combined has plummeted by 17 percent — 141 inmates — in the last year alone. Why spend more money on the infrastructure of incarceration, the activists pressed, when it could be better spent on programs getting mental health services and other programmatic assistance to people whose criminal transgressions stems from their mental-health challenges? 

As much as jail populations are dropping today, Supervisor Steve Lavagnino responded, they will start going back up when all the zoning changes recently approved begin sprouting up new housing units in Lompoc, Santa Maria, and Goleta, where just one proposed development is expected to generate as many people as the whole town of Buellton. 

As it is, the plan the supervisors approved calls for a reduction in the number of total jail beds from 1,127 to 880, which actually translates to just 750 when all the necessary buffers are factored in. 

Prior to this Tuesday’s hearing, the supervisors ordered the company getting the design-build contract for the new North County additions to meet and engage with stakeholders in Santa Maria and Santa Barbara and on Zoom. The stakeholders — mostly the same activists— showed up armed with no shortage of suggestions, many of which were not just taken to heart but were used to alter the designs. 

Based on these suggestions, the new plans call for more spaces where inmates can meet with their lawyers, healthcare providers and mental-health case workers with clients, and visitors with inmates. Where space had been provided for programs before, more space is being provided for now. Even the advocates conceded the meetings bore tangible fruit, but their minds were not changed; they still wanted a pause on two of the six new pods. 

That, the supervisors were told, would dramatically undermine the economies of scale that could be obtained by doing all the work at once, though no dollar amount was offered.

Supervisor Lavagnino said he struggled to come to terms with how the U.S. locks up more people globally while at the same time 80 percent of the people in jail are in for felony offenses and not people he’d want living near him. 

Supervisor Joan Hartmann recalled how tears were coming out of her eyes when she visited the Main Jail, so grim a place it is. By contrast, she said, the new North County jail is “night and day,” with bright colors, light, much more space, better bathrooms, and more outdoor recreational space. What exactly happens with the Main Jail remains to be seen, but the current plan is that only its inmate reception area will be left intact.