Praise for jail’s broader focus
Stanislaus County facility offers mental health services and a shot at rehabilitation.
Stanislaus County facility offers mental health services, shot at rehabilitation.
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown once knew Adam Christianson as the most difficult sheriff in the state.
But the two shook hands last week as Stanislaus County became the first in California to open a new detention center with state funding allocated under realignment — a 2011 criminal justice reform effort that Brown has aggressively pushed and Christianson once fiercely opposed.
“This facility is getting it right,” Brown said at the site’s dedication ceremony in Modesto. “It is more than time behind bars. It is intervention with intelligence and humanity and force.”
The $114-million detention center, which stretches across more than 171,000 square feet, has 480 maximum-security beds and provides housing for 57 medical and mental health offenders. It also has 15 hospital beds.
The county used $80 million in state funding awarded for new jail construction under legislation that was part of realign- ment, a change to state law that eased prison crowding by making counties responsible for holding offenders previously in state custody.
Christianson, a former “skeptic in chief,” said he had come to embrace a culture shift with the criminal justice system that seeks to create a jail system centered on rehabilitating offenders and providing mental health services.
“I am very proud of the community support and what we have been able to achieve, especially when you learn to become more adaptable to change,” Christianson said. “I can tell you law enforcement doesn’t embrace change a lot, but we have now.”