County rethinking jail project’s scope
With inmate population declining, costs rising, tower may be downsized
SAN JOSE — Faced with soaring costs and a dwindling inmate population, Santa Clara County is rethinking plans to replace one of its rundown Main Jail towers, just as blueprints for a new, $365 million high-rise are about to be drawn up.
The county’s decision to consider downsizing the 815-bed tower by up to 300 beds reflects California’s continuing retreat from a tough-on-crime, lock’em-up mentality to a softer approach, particularly in the Bay Area.
Although some jails in South-
ern California are still over capacity, the number of inmates statewide and in this region has dropped sharply since voters overwhelmingly approved Proposition 47, the 2014 law that reduced some drug possession and property crimes to misdemeanors.
To support the decriminalization trend, state grants for jail construction since Proposition 47 have been aimed at in-custody mental health treatment and other services, rather than increasing jail capacity. For instance, Santa Clara County’s $80 million grant to replace its 60-yearold Mail Jail South tower covers a new seven-story tower with a net gain — after accounting for replacing the 797 beds in the existing tower — of only 18 new beds, including two floors of mental health beds. The existing tower is set to close in mid-May.
Mental health focus
Now, officials want to retain the mental health component while weighing whether to cut the number of other beds. The review comes as three jail guards are on trial for the 2015 beating death of a mentally ill inmate, a case that underscored the need for a better approach to mentally ill inmates.
“We don’t need a Taj Mahal,’’ Santa Clara County Sheriff Laurie Smith said. “So much has changed since we started that I wanted us to re-evaluate the plan, come up with realistic population projections and consider a fiscally responsible alternative.’’
In other parts of the Bay Area, officials also are focusing money for jails on mental health. In Contra Costa County, officials hope to win approval in mid-May for a $70 million grant to replace 416 jail beds and build a re-entry center and mental health facility.
And even though half of Alameda County’s 5,000 jail beds sit empty, officials there have been awarded a $54.5 million state grant to update old units, add space for vocational and other programs, and build a mental health center.
“People here want jobs, not jails, and books, not bars,’’ Sheriff Gregory J. Ahern said.
That’s doubly true in San Francisco, where the Board of Supervisors two years ago secured an $80 million grant to help replace a seismically unsafe jail with a new, 384bed facility. However, the city relinquished the grant last year after community activists protested, saying San Francisco should invest in diversion programs and mental health services, not a new jail.
Santa Clara County’s current plan is based on a consultant’s report that grossly overestimated the growth of the jail population, predicting it would shoot up last year by 20 percent, or 730 inmates, when it actually declined slightly.
The number of jail inmates had soared temporarily under Gov. Jerry Brown’s “realignment’’ plan, which reduced prison overcrowding beginning in late 2011 by having low-level felons serve time in county jails. But the trend didn’t last after voters eased the state’s tough three-strikes policy in 2012 and approved Proposition 47 two years later.
At the same time, the estimated cost of building the new jail has skyrocketed from $70 million two years ago, which a top county executive later called unrealistic, to $365 million. Only 20 percent of construction would now be covered by the state grant. And annual labor costs to run the new jail tower have shot up from $11 million to $21 million.
Saying they are optimistic that the jail population could keep declining, county officials plan to hire a new consultant to study scaling back the plan. Since 2008, the number of criminal cases filed in the county plummeted 45 percent, from 28,403 to 15,697.
The county also is taking steps to reduce the total number of inmates, including transferring convicted inmates to state prison more quickly and trying to get prosecutors and government-appointed defense attorneys to resolve 122 pending criminal cases involving poor defendants who have been in custody for more than three years. In addition, lawsuits by inmate rights groups about living conditions in the jails have spurred the county to avoid segregating prisoners in virtual solitary confinement, reducing the need to build more expensive highsecurity cells.
Shifting inmates
Finally, Supervisor Cindy Chavez and Superior Court Judge Stephen Manley are working with a task force on a diversion program to release under close supervision about 100 severely mentally ill inmates who are in custody only because they are on a long waiting list for a bed in a residential treatment center. Clearing them out became a priority in August 2015, after the three guards allegedly beat to death Michael Tyree, a bipolar inmate awaiting such a placement.
Activists welcomed the county’s new approach.
“It’s very exciting they’re reconsidering,” said former prosecutor Lenore Anderson, executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice, the group that steered the campaign for Proposition 47. “A balanced approach to public safety is what voters want, meaning scale back on incarceration and invest in treatment and diversion.”
But opposition may emerge because California’s violent and property crime rates increased slightly in 2015, the last year figures were available, though they are still half the rates of 20 years ago.
County Executive Jeff Smith said once the new study is done in June, the supervisors will decide at a public meeting whether to revise the new jail plan. Smith predicted the county could scale back the plan without losing the state grant.