Santa Rita Jail expansion is postponed indefinitely

A planned $80 million expansion of the Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County has been indefinitely postponed, the county’s General Services Agency told the Board of Supervisors last month, citing “operational delays.”

The plan, which would have included $26 million in county funds and established a mental health wing inside the 34-yearold facility, faced steep opposition from criminal justice reform and faithbased organizations that argued the project was a poor solution to the jail’s ongoing challenges, which include more than 50 deaths and at least 15 suicides in the past decade.

State Sen. Nancy Skinner, D-Berkeley, also opposed the project in a Dec. 5, 2023, letter to the director of the State Public Works Board, which is responsible for allocating the state funding needed to complete the project. Citing the jail’s declining daily population, Skinner questioned whether the project was the best way to meet the terms of a 2022 consent decree obligating the facility to improve access to mental health services.

The consent decree, reached after a 2018 classaction lawsuit that alleged inhumane treatment of incarcerated people, especially those with mental disabilities, requires the jail to reduce its dependence on solitary confinement, ensure everyone is given at least 14 hours a week outside their cells and to improve access to mental health care.

Specifically, the consent decree requires the jail to find more confidential spaces for people to meet with mental health clinicians and to establish a therapeutic housing unit for those with significant mental health needs. The settlement requires Alameda County to hire more sheriff’s deputies and mental health practitioners to work in the Dublin facility, an outcome many incarcerated people and advocates objected to.

“We have to do better care inside and we have to have better care outside,”

Micky Duxbury, who helps run the Stop Deaths in the Jail campaign for the nonprofit Interfaith Coalition for Justice in Our Jails, told the Chronicle before the county’s announcement. “But the board has not made that happen. They have not worked with people in the community to figure out how to have a facility that meets the needs of the seriously mentally ill.”

In November, the coalition presented a letter to the board signed by 78 of its members, including 20 clergy members, that called for better mental health support in the community rather than in the jail, the fifth largest in the nation, and for more stakeholders to be consulted about how to handle mental health in the facility going forward.

Alameda County’s steps to improve access to mental health care in the two years since the settlement has been a “mixed bag,” said class counsel Amy Xu, an attorney for Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld, the law firm that represents plaintiffs in the class.

While the county pursued construction of a new wing to house mental health treatment, its plans to make best use of their current space have not been prioritized, Xu said. The county is missing construction deadlines, even for changes to its existing building, she said.

“The jail should push forward on the plans to create the confidential spaces in the jail itself,” Xu said. “It’s not absolutely necessary to develop a new space.”

Santa Rita Jail’s population has substantially declined in the last decade, falling from an average daily population of over 3,200 in 2014 to about 2,000 in 2022. That should make more resources and space available to provide mental health support in the community, said Joy George, an organizer for community nonprofit Restore Oakland.

Restore Oakland has been holding demonstrations calling for more investments in communitycentered care and treatment, which would decrease the need for mental health care in the jail, making staffing and space issues more manageable while better serving people, she said.

The decision to halt the expansion comes in the wake of a highly publicized settlement over a wrongful death lawsuit filed by the family of Maurice Monk, who died at Santa Rita Jail after being sent there for missing a court date in 2021. Monk’s family alleged that he was severely neglected for days despite being visibly in crisis. The family’s lawsuit also alleged that an internal investigation found that sheriff’s deputies may not have checked on Monk and may have forged records that indicated otherwise.

The county settled with Monk’s family for $7 million in November and the incident is being investigated by the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and FBI.

The Alameda County General Services Agency declined to comment for this story.

Sheriff’s spokesperson Lt. Tya Modeste said that while the project is at a “standstill,” the department will continue to use available jail space for mental health clinicians to meet with people, for example, by repurposing visiting areas.