There are at least a couple of ways to get into the Santa Barbara County Main Jail. One is, obviously, getting arrested. Another, less dubious option, is to go on a guided tour of the jail with Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office Chief Deputy Laz Salinas.
Salinas walks the jail on a recent Thursday, snaking down one corridor after another, turning, and turning again. He stops at one cell and asks the inmates—about a dozen—who’s from the Santa Maria/Lompoc area, and nearly all of them raise their hands. Eventually the tour ends in the basement, near the kitchen, where the space was converted to accommodate an extra 50 inmates.
With an aging, overcrowded jail on his hands, Sheriff Bill Brown is pushing to get started with building a new, multimillion dollar facility in Santa Maria. The plans have been in the works for almost a decade, but questions remain about what will happen to the old jail once the new one’s built. With the North County Jail on the cusp of beginning construction, even with tens of millions of dollars in state grant money awarded to the county, some county supervisors are threatening to pull the plug on the project if the county has to pay to operate two jails at once.
Primitive and austere
At the start of the jail tour, Salinas opens two security doors, passes through the employee recreation room, opens another security door, and steps into the jail proper. To the left, a long corridor extends down the length of the jail. Light reflects off the fading government-approved beige walls. This is the east area of the jail, with around 160 rated beds. Throughout the tour, he occasionally repeats the words “primitive” and “austere” as he refers to the jail.
An L-shaped building was added to the existing structure in 1971. A raised seam cuts across the floor, evidence of two conjoined buildings. It’s the second oldest part of the jail. Upon entry, the inmates aren’t visible, but the murmur of conversation and the shuffling of human bodies echoes from all different directions.
For Sheriff Brown, not only is the add-on an inefficient design, but it has the potential to be dangerous for his deputies. Other additions were completed in 1988, 1992, and 1999, according to a 2010 Santa Barbara County grand jury report. He called the design “rambling” and “piecemeal.”
“The majority of the facility is linear—the old cage or barred type areas with long hallways and so forth,” Brown told the Sun. “It’s inefficient from the standpoint that in order for us to see what’s going on in those modules, you have to have custody deputies walk around and look into those modules. Obviously there’s times when they’re not there and where things can happen and things go on that are not good.”
The lack of a barrier aside from bars means that the inmates can easily slip their hands out of the cells and grab whatever or whoever is approaching in the passageway.
According to Salinas, inmate assaults generally occur every 30 hours. Deputies occasionally fall victim to inmate violence, too, he said, adding that the building’s linear shape contributes to their danger, because it limits deputies’ field of vision as they approach the cells.
The other problem, according to Brown, is that the county’s population center is in the north, rather than the south. The Main Jail is in the city of Santa Barbara.
Although he doesn’t cite it as the primary reason for a newer, bigger jail anymore, Brown said overcrowding is still a problem with the Main Jail. Because of this, the jail has been a continuous target of the Santa Barbara County grand jury. The current jail is rated for a little more than 700 inmates, but holds anywhere between 800 and 1,000 inmates on a monthly basis.
The passage of AB 109 by the state Legislature in 2011 didn’t help the issue. Also known as realignment, the law responded to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that mandated California reduce to its prison population. AB 109 pushed criminals serving time for non-serious, non-violent, or non-sexual crimes from the prison system to county jails. According to Brown, the jail houses roughly 150 AB 109 inmates.
A grand jury report released in June 2013 determined that the Main Jail was inadequate to handle this challenge. According to the report, the average length of incarceration jumped from 20 days to one year after AB 109. And this is straining staff resources, Brown said.
“We can have people with us for … 20 or more years,” Brown said. “There’s no limit, other than a life sentence, on the amount of time someone can be sentenced to county jail. The jail just wasn’t built or designed for those kinds of inmates.”
Brown added that these are the kinds of inmates who need additional requirements in terms of their vocational, education, recreational, religious needs, etc. With the jail’s current warehouse-style design, Brown said it doesn’t lend itself to “programming” and thereby helping to rehabilitate inmates for re-entry into society. Rehabilitation efforts can take the form of classroom-style education, and Brown said the long walks between cells and classrooms often require multiple deputies and a tremendous amount of time.
It obligates inmates to be moved, or a group of them to be moved to the programming area with at least one custody deputy standing by to guard the inmates and counselors and then escort inmates back to the jail. The problem, Brown said, is that the jail has been at a minimum staffing level for many years because of the recession. He added that budget cuts have constrained his ability to provide as much programming as he would like.
According to Brown, that programming is essential to prevent inmates from becoming repeat offenders and ending up back in jail. The training regimen helps inmates learn skills that can’t normally be taught or encouraged in a jail such as the county’s, things like helping conquer addiction, managing anger, or learning an employable skill.
“These are types of things that typically can’t be taught or encouraged in a traditional linear jail environment,” Brown said, “unless you have lots and lots and lots of staff, which becomes very cost prohibitive.”
The new jail would be constructed in a “podular” design, according to Brown, where deputies could have a much better field of vision and could see different parts of the inmate housing area at the same time. From the outside, plans for the new design show that the jail looks nothing like a jail. Rather, it blends in with Spanish-style architecture and includes an additional facility that’s supposed to help reduce recidivism and help inmates transition into society.
Of course, all of this will cost a boatload of money.
Money, money, money
The cost for the northern jail is going to be huge. Luckily, Brown got his wish with an $80 million grant from the state to construct the new facility. That grant came with AB 900 legislation passed in 2012. The grant is conditional, requiring a 10 percent match to come from the county, according to a county website that provides basic information on the project. The website estimates a total cost of $96.1 million.
The project calls for a 139,000 square-foot facility to be built on a 50-acre space near the corner of Black and Betteravia Roads, just beyond the city limits of Santa Maria.
The original plan for the jail called for 376 beds, including 32 special use beds for medical or mentally ill inmates, according to Brown. Another piece of state legislation, SB 1022, allocated additional funding to counties to build facilities geared toward rehabilitation and to replace aging obsolete facilities. Santa Barbara County successfully obtained $40 million in 2014 from SB 1022, bringing the state grants total to nearly $120 million—Santa Barbara is only one of three counties in the state to receive both, according to Brown.
The most recent grant also requires a 10 percent match from the county, Brown said.
The money would pay for an additional, “state-of-the-art” portion of the jail called the Sheriff’s Treatment and Re-entry (STAR) facility and includes a 100-bed “step-down” dormitory-style section to prepare inmates for a return to their communities, Brown said. The STAR facility would also house inmates in protective custody—including the mentally ill—who can’t be placed in general population.
Not everyone on the North County Jail team wants the extra portion to be added to the would-be facility. In May, 2nd District Supervisor Janet Wolf voted against building the STAR facility. She told the Sun that the services that would be provided in this facility are already paid for through the probation department.
The new jail sounds promising, but the problem, according to some county supervisors, is what to do with the Main Jail once the new one is built.
For 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, a supporter of the northern jail project, the cost of running both jails is simply too much.
“I don’t want to build a whole brand new jail and run a South County jail at the same level that’s been run in the past,” Lavagnino said. “We can’t afford to run two full blown jails at the same time.”
The projected cost of running the new jail is a moving target. First it was $17 million a year, then it increased to around $18 million, and now it seems to have risen to more than $19 million, according to Santa Barbara County Budget Director Tom Alvarez. Brown said it’s hard to pin down an exact cost due to various factors, including inflation.
But Alvarez said the operating cost ought to be covered by the time the jail is built. Alvarez said the county’s already set aside money to pay for the grant match. To help alleviate the cost of operation, the county is dedicating a portion of its budget to a special fund each fiscal year. For example, the fund will see $6.1 million by Oct. 1 (the start of the 2015-2016 fiscal year) and will end the year with about $14 million, according to Alvarez. He said the county will keep adding to the fund until the jail opens, and the hope is that the fund will pay for the jail’s operation year after year.
The money is derived from property taxes, which is the county’s primary source of discretionary revenue, according to Alvarez.
What will happen with the old facility is anyone’s guess. However, Brown told the Sun that he might mothball portions of the old jail, demolish some portions, and still leave other portions open. He also alluded to the possibility of leasing the space to other agencies, although it’s not clear which ones.
For Lavagnino, though, the moving target of operating costs for the new jail and the murky plans for the current jail aren’t really good enough.
“Once you build the North County Jail, I’m kind of stuck,” Lavagnino said. “The money’s already outlayed. I want to know now.”
There are also the questions of construction bids, which are set to open in the coming months, and the county’s required grant match. Although Alvarez said a fund was already set aside for the match, Lavagnino alluded to the possibility of withdrawing his support for the project if the bids come in too high.
And another issue keeps rearing its ugly head: what to do with the mentally ill. The current jail operates as the de facto institution for the mentally ill. The proposed STAR facility could give the county a proper place to treat those inmates.
Lavagnino admitted that something must be done to get the mentally ill out of jail and into treatment, but at the same time he said he realizes that some also have the potential to be dangerous. The Sheriff echoed this sentiment. As of now, options to treat the mentally ill are almost non-existent.
“It’s not one or the other,” Lavagnino said. “There are mentally ill inside the jail, and we have to get them out of there. But there are some nasty criminals in Santa Barbara County, and we have to lock them up. I’m committed to having systems for both.”
Contact Staff Writer David Minsky at dminsky@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jun 25 – Jul 2, 2015.
