Building new jail would worsen health in Santa Clara County
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors is deciding if our county should invest in building a new jail. Currently, the county jails approximately 2,500 people, disproportionately Black and Latinx, at a cost of $400,000 per day. Time spent in jail worsens a person’s mental health, and according to a 2016 grand jury report, 40%-50% of the men and 80% of the women in our jail already have mental illness.
As doctors working in San Jose, it is easy for us to see why the county jails worsen our patients’ health. When an inmate has an emergent mental health crisis, jails might have to wait months before a hospital bed becomes available because of our county’s significant shortage of mental health infrastructure, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Michael Tyree, an inmate with mental illness at the jail in downtown San Jose, died in 2015 after being beaten by three guards who were ultimately convicted of murder. During a mental health crisis in 2018, Andrew Hogan suffered injuries that left him with permanent disabilities, leading to a $10 million settlement for his family that the county must pay.
For those not in crisis, time spent in jail can exacerbate their mental health. Improving health requires multidisciplinary care teams, community support and the combination of individualized counseling with medication management. None of this can be offered adequately in a jail. As county Sheriff Laurie Smith succinctly summed it up, “Jails are not the place for people who have serious mental health issues.”
Despite the negative health impacts of incarceration, 8590% of current inmates are held in pretrial detention, meaning they have not been convicted of a crime and are being forced to wait in jail for their day in court. Our county offers limited pretrial services that allow certain people to return to the community instead of staying in jail in pretrial detention. In recent years these services have led to a decrease in our jail population by more than 40% from a peak in 2014. However, courts determine eligibility for pretrial release with assessment tools that disadvantage the chance of pretrial release for people with mental illness and addiction. We know that these populations are particularly vulnerable to the negative effects of jail, and more should be done to get them out and connect them to mental health services.
Instead of spending up to $400 million on a new jail, we should invest in the expansion of mental health resources within our community and the social supports that prevent incarceration like affordable housing and quality education.
We should also expand access to pretrial services for those with mental illness and addiction and commit to truly supporting those people as members of our community.
These are ambitious commitments that require vision and leadership in Santa Clara County. The building of a new jail instead further criminalizes mental illness, addiction and poverty. We hope that our board of supervisors votes to reject the new jail and instead commits to building a safe and healthy Santa Clara County.