Fearing quake, Breed wants rundown jail empty by 2021
San Francisco Mayor London Breed has put a deadline on when she wants the more than 300 inmates locked up at the county jail on Bryant Street removed from the dilapidated building vulnerable to collapse in a powerful earthquake.
Breed plans to announce Thursday that she expects the inmates at the jail, housed in the Hall of Justice, to be moved by July 2021 — the deadline for hundreds of staffers from the district attorney’s, sheriff’s and public defender’s offices as well as the Police Department and other agencies to move.
Officials have been trying to wind down operations at the crumbling Hall of Justice at 850 Bryant St. for years. The city envisions tearing down much of the building starting in 2025 and constructing a new “justice center” in its place, starting in 2028 that will eventually house the Sheriff’s Department, the public defender, Adult Probation Department, the district attorney and the Superior Courts.
But the shoddy and outright dangerous
conditions have prompted an early exodus. Firstresponders and other staffers have been gradually moving out, sometimes into new facilities, like the medical examiner’s office, and other times into buildings the city is leasing temporarily.
Exactly where the inmates will go remains unclear — the city is exploring multiple options, including outofcounty facilities. But outofcounty locations would mean that a portion of San Francisco’s jailed population is housed outside the city for years — a scenario that will likely add costs and complexity for inmates, their families and the city’s criminal justice system.
But not moving the inmates presents a brutal alternative: allowing city staffers to work out of safer buildings while inmates remain in cells that could trap or kill them in the event of a big earthquake. Court staff will remain at the Hall of Justice even after other departments and inmates have relocated. The state’s judicial branch handles the budget decisions for the courts, leaving the city little leeway over their capital plans.
“While we work to implement this longterm Justice Campus, it’s important that we move incarcerated individuals out of the existing Hall of Justice as soon as we can, and we are exploring all options to transfer people to better and more humane conditions,” Breed said in a statement.
She said she hopes the city’s capital planning committee, which schedules the city’s bond sales, can speed up the timeline. The committee is chaired by City Administrator Naomi Kelly, whose office is central to the exit of city staffers. Kelly will also oversee a group responsible for designing the future justice center.
Built in 1958, the Hall of Justice was declared seismically unsafe by city engineers in the 1990s. A city report from 2012 estimated that a 7.9magnitude quake on the San Andreas Fault during the workday would lead to more 100 injuries and up to 25 deaths.
The building is also infamous for its sordid sewer problems, among a host of other issues. Workers there have complained repeatedly of urine leaking through the ceiling. Inmates there sued the city in July 2018 over sewage problems.
Sheriff Vicki Hennessy has previously called the jail “an embarrassment to the city.” She has proposed renovating a shuttered, mostly empty minimumsecurity building in San Bruno that San Francisco owns, an idea that may be reconsidered in light of Breed’s July 2021 deadline. But getting the San Bruno jail operational would cost nearly as much as building a new one, Hennessy has said.
In 2015, when Breed was president of the Board of Supervisors, it rejected a contentious, $215 million proposal to build a new jail to replace the one at the Hall of Justice in favor of greater investments in diversion programs and mental health services. At the time, Breed said the brokendown jail “needs to come down, but more than a building we need to tear down the system of mass incarceration it represents.”