Though November’s voters refused to fund the construction and operation of a new North Santa Barbara County jail, the concept isn’t dead. In fact, some Santa Maria city leaders are saying it’s a question of when—not if—the jail will be up and running to house the county’s burgeoning prison population.
Undeterred by the public rejection of Measure S—a failed ballot initiative that would’ve added a countywide half-cent sales tax to build and maintain the jail—Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown is already exploring alternative funding options.
Sheriff’s Department spokesman Drew Sugars said Brown doesn’t have much to say until state and county budgets for 2011-12 are released. Once they’re settled, he said, the department will have the guidelines in place to move forward with resurrecting the project.
“The need [for a new jail] has not gone away,” Sugars said. “That has never changed. Something has to be done; the question is what and how?”
According to Sugars, possible funding options could include a mix of state and local money and even another tax measure—though the idea admittedly didn’t seem too popular the last time around.
“Everything’s on the table right now,” he said.
Brown is currently testing the waters among the public and other civic leaders, especially those who were opposed to the tax measure but remain supportive of building a new jail, such as Santa Maria City Councilwoman Alice Patino. Brown asked Patino to hold a public meeting to discuss funding alternatives at Santa Maria City Hall on March 1. The small group of local residents who showed up was more interested in talking about alternative options to incarceration—building more schools and relaxing drug laws—than finding other funding sources.
Patino, while opposed to new taxes, favors the jail in theory. She said money should have been set aside for it long ago, and believes the defeat of Measure S was more indicative of a public against the idea of another tax, not another jail.
“I believe there is a need for it,” Patino said. “The question is how do we build it?”
Not surprisingly, Patino has support in the form of Santa Maria Police Chief Dan Macagni, who disputed the notion that the county’s current prison population is made up of “low-level” criminals.
“It’s not that we don’t need a jail,” Macagni said. “It’s that people don’t want to pay for it. These aren’t minor criminals who are in our jail now. They’re all serious offenders.”
Macagni, who supports having a jail in Santa Maria to ease the burden on law enforcement agents who transport arrestees to Santa Barbara for booking, believes its construction is an eventuality.
“One will be built someday,” he said. “It will happen.”
Both Patino and Macagni stressed the importance of reducing the recidivism rate among the county’s current jail population, including working with nonprofit organizations to help keep low-income youth off the streets. Patino said alternatives to incarceration would be on the table when she discussed her recommendations with Brown.
According to Sugars, Brown has always supported a combination of programs to reduce recidivism. In and of itself, he said, another prison won’t be enough to solve the problem.
“You can’t just build more jails and just push people out and expect them to be functioning members of society,” Sugars said. “Ultimately the best thing is to have somebody who’s working and paying into the system, not being a drain on the system and causing grief for other people through crime. That has to be part of the solution. You can’t just build. You’ve got to figure out a way so people aren’t coming back.”
For those looking to change their lives inside the prison walls, the county jail offers job skills training and anger management classes. Through the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Treatment Program, inmates receive alcohol and drug addiction counseling, funded by the inmates themselves through sales of phone cards and other items.
However, as often happens in times of fiscal crises, social programs encouraging rehabilitation are the first to get the axe. With the public safety sector boasting the largest budget of any department in the county, the jail system and the Sheriff’s Department will likely bear the brunt of budget cuts when all is said and done. With the department already stretched thin financially as it is, Sugars said, there simply may not be enough money to fund any more anti-recidivism programs.
“We have been taking hits every year,” he said. “And this one might be the biggest one of them all.”
When it comes to making more room, the county could look at more affordable options, Sugars said, but the idea of a tent jail—similar to Arizona’s “tent city”—simply won’t fly here.
“Those folks are lower-level inmates,” he said of typical tent-city candidates. “They’re the type we’ve let out. They’re not even in our jail. Our jail is filled with people who aren’t the kind you’d want in tents.
You need mortar and iron to keep these folks in.”
Moving forward, Sugars said the process of building momentum behind a new jail plan will include more public forums throughout the county, though none are scheduled at this point.
“One way or another, you’re going to have to get the public to agree on a solution to make it happen,” he said. “You can’t force that through. There has to be some con-sensus.”
Staff Writer Jeremy Thomas can be contacted at jthomas@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Mar 10-17, 2011.
