With crime on the rise this year, local police chiefs say opening the North County jail will alleviate challenges their departments are facing. But some inmate advocates and elected officials are concerned about what it all means for the future of inmate population reduction.
Senior Project Manager for the Northern Branch Jail Project John Green told the Sun that the project is in its final stages, and should be substantially complete by July 31 this year.
“Provided that we can get the final acceptance from the state, we hope to have occupancy in early fall 2021,” Green said.
The Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Office presented an analysis of jail capacity and what the inmate population might look like once the new jail opens during a June 1 special meeting of the Board of Supervisors.
North County police chiefs told supervisors they were eager to use the new jail and the resources that will come with it.
“There’s three agencies in Northern County that we have to travel anywhere from 55 to 80 miles if we have to book somebody down south,” Lompoc Police Chief Joseph Mariani said at the June 1 meeting. “Especially for the smaller agencies like myself, that is a huge, huge demand for us and impact on us when we have to send someone, at a minimum for three hours, that are gone from the city.”
Guadalupe Police Chief Michael Cash said small communities like his are often the least resourced.
“We have people who need these services,” he said. “I am not an advocate for always putting people in jail, but there’s people at times who will not get assistance until they’re forced to or court mandated to, and they need sometimes to be in a system, to be forced to get help.”
Santa Maria Police Chief Marc Schneider said from 2019 to 2020, there was a 72 percent increase in aggravated assaults and a 67 percent increase in motor vehicle thefts in Santa Maria. In 2020 there were 57 total shootings, and as of June 1, there had already been 41 in 2021.
“We don’t want to obviously fill the jail with people that do not need to be there, but until we have different systems in place to address some of the mental illness and drug addiction, it presents as very challenging to the police department in what we do with these individuals in these crisis moments,” Schneider said.
But a looming question remains once the North County branch opens: the extent to which the South County Main Jail will continue to be used. The Sheriff’s Office presented a plan at the June 1 meeting that laid out different tiers of potential capacities.
“We’ve developed a rolling housing reduction plan,” Chief Custody Deputy Vincent Wasilewski said. “Our plan involves strategically shutting down and opening housing areas to maximize on-duty staff and reduce overtime.”
As the average daily capacity hits certain trigger levels, under the plan, the jail would move up and down through a tier system to determine how many beds to make available at a given time. Second District Supervisor Gregg Hart criticized the plan for not doing enough to proactively keep the population low, which has seen a 37 percent drop over the last year.
“As of last Friday, the population of the jail I think was 580 people, and 80 of those people were waiting transfer to state prison, so our organic county population was 500,” Hart said. “The reason we’re having these conversations is because the historic trend is not the trend that we’re dealing with today.”
He expressed frustration that the sheriff’s plans don’t maximize the potential cost savings from a reduced jail population, money that could be used for mental health programs and to reduce recidivism.
“What we’re advocating for is keeping the low level offenders from going back in, going back to business as usual that happened before COVID,” Hart said. “The idea that, because the North County jail’s more convenient, to put low level offenders back in—that’s a problem. … Operating the county jail with 37 percent fewer prisoners for a year, and not realizing any cost savings from that, and having no prospect going forward of realizing any cost savings from that—something is seriously broken in the system.”
Aaron Fischer is a civil rights attorney and lead class counsel in Murray v. County of Santa Barbara, a jail conditions case that reached a settlement last year. He said the new jail opening presents “an enormous moment of opportunity” for the county to institutionalize some of the positive changes seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“The settlement and federal court order in our case do not require a jail of a certain size or population,” Fischer wrote in an email to the Sun. “But the court order does apply to all jail facilities that the county chooses to operate. What that means practically is that a smart and efficient system that incarcerates fewer people can mean a path to compliance with significant cost savings—and those savings can be invested in community-based solutions.”
This article appears in Jun 10-17, 2021.
