Though attendance numbers to this year’s Santa Barbara County Fair were slightly less than last year’s, livestock numbers were up, generating more than $2.9 million in auction income.
Nice work 4-H and FFA students!
I hope you don’t go out and spend that on something smart like textbooks. Meanwhile, the Santa Maria Police Department is using its dollars to conduct yet another DUI checkpoint!
This one’s going to be on July 24 between 6 p.m. and 3 a.m. What happened with the last checkpoint? If I remember correctly, it yielded no DUI arrests.
“Research shows that crashes involving alcohol drop by an average of 20 percent when well-publicized checkpoints are conducted often enough,” a press release said. I feel like maybe the drunk drivers just avoid the checkpoints. Or they just don’t drive on those nights, which is pretty effective, I guess.
It’s definitely more effective than that whole pizza party thing that happened with the SLO Police Department. Did you hear about that? On one night in February, a pizza party was offered if officers yielded more than five DUI arrests. If the point is to keep drunk drivers off the road, it would seem that SMPD’s got it covered. But SLOPD’s more concerned about hungry police officers.
As far as law enforcement offices go, though, I can never figure out quite why they spend money the way they do. In Santa Barbara County, we’ve got a couple of contracts with private companies that provide services to inmates and the jail. It’s cost saving, according to the county Sheriff’s Office, as in: It would cost the county more to provide the services itself.
The two that immediately come to mind are food and health services. My feathers shudder a little to think of being locked up for something. But they also shudder a little to think of being provided nutrition and health by companies that have a history of lawsuits and issues across the country. Remember Aramark Correctional Services? They’re still around, serving up sub-par food to county inmates.
What a fuss that company kicked up. Inmates complained about food and threatened hunger strikes, and county residents with loved ones in jail pleaded with the county Board of Supervisors. If inmates are unhappy with their food, tough beans. Don’t get locked up in the first place.
Now, if food’s making inmates sick, on the other hand, that’s another issue altogether—because while I think gourmet shouldn’t be an option for jail food, I don’t think malnutrition, stomach cramps, or vomiting should be an option either.
A cursory (just love that word!) Internet search at the time, February 2014, showed six states where issues with Aramark-provided food made headlines. But, to be fair, no one died from eating Aramark food, at least none that I’m aware of.
However, complaints about another private company providing services in this county’s jail allege that inmates are in fact dying because of the poor quality of health care. That company’s called Corizon Health, and it’s a Tennessee-based company with lawsuits filed against it in several of the states it operates in. A recent lawsuit from Lane County in Oregon alleged that an inmate who died several months after receiving a spinal injury in jail wasn’t hospitalized for at least six hours after he rammed his head into a wall.
The county settled the lawsuit with a $500,000 settlement, according to the Associated Press.
A lady who was incarcerated in Santa Barbara County’s Main Jail told the Sun she didn’t receive the medication she was supposed to. And a recent death in the Main Jail is being called avoidable by at least one group: Families ACT! in Santa Barbara. The group alleges that if Raymond Herrera had been in a hospital, he wouldn’t have died. Instead, he passed away in county custody. The coroner’s report said he died of internal bleeding from a ruptured spleen.
Does the Sheriff’s Office actually look for these kinds of past issues when it signs up a private company to save the county money. A lawsuit feels like an awfully big liability, and since Corizon has several already filed against it, maybe we should be looking elsewhere to fill that privatized jail service need. The contract’s up in October. Maybe we should be like the county fair and auction the contract off. Only instead of finding the cheapest bidder, we should find the health services company with the least amount of wrongful death lawsuits filed against it.
The Canary decided to avoid jail time and write for a living. She likes her freedom. Comment at canary@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in Jul 23-30, 2015.