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Overcrowded Jail

Build More Jails?

Rethinking Public Safety

David Romano.
David Romano

• • • • • • • • • • December 2024 • • • • • • • • • •

What is public safety, and how do you achieve it? Lock up the bad guys? Give them long sentences, and make sure you have a tough District Attorney who will carry out this punitive program? Most people would prefer to just drop all offenders into a black hole, out of sight, out of mind; never to be spoken of or thought of again. Who wants to spend time thinking about what happens to a person once they go to jail?

There’s a problem with this: every person sent to jail is returning to a neighborhood near you. Some will be in a few weeks, some not for months or years, but they will come back. And, if they are not actually coming back to your neighborhood, they will be on Market Street, or at Civic Center, or on the bus you or your child is riding.

Unless you think that every person arrested for a crime should simply be locked up forever, you need to think about what is going to happen to your fellow citizens when they are behind bars. Will they come back into society reformed, rehabilitated, ready to go to work, and wanting to be productive, caring members of our community, armed with new social and professional skills? Or will they be angry, dysfunctional, resentful, bent on revenge against society? Will they be mentally, emotionally, or physically damaged from the neglect and abuse they received while incarcerated?

A brief look at what goes on—just in San Francisco jails reveals a dire situation.

“As of press time, the average stay in San Francisco’s jails was324 days. That means that many people spend months or even years without time outside. The Appealhas identified at least four people held pretrial for nine years or longer. Two men who have been there for more than a decade have filed separate lawsuits alleging mistreatment, sexual harassment, and abuse by deputies. The City’s jail populations have been increasing, and The Appeal’s reporting has found hundreds of people held for non-violent property crimes. Despite a political push in San Francisco to lock up more people in the name of public safety, people in detention say they are neglected once inside. They describe an existence without sunlight, exercise, adequate healthcare, hygiene, or drinkable water. Some also describe a frequent use of administrative segregation and a culture of retaliation.” - Women Languish at San Francisco’s Jail for Years Without Answers—or Sunlight by Amy Martyn, Nov 12, 2024.

This is punishing people who have not even been convicted, only arrested. That is not justice. Does anyone think this can be good for the individual involved or for the community?

“The situation in San Francisco’s jails is dire. Lockdowns are increasingly frequent as deputies struggle to manage confrontations with inmates. The jails are overcrowded with individuals suffering from mental illness and substance abuse disorders, creating a volatile atmosphere. Deputies are being attacked and hospitalized, highlighting the risks they face daily. This environment is not only unsafe for staff but also undermines any attempts at rehabilitation for inmates.” - The Unaddressed Crisis in San Francisco’s Jails, June 17, 2024, SF Deputy Sheriffs Association website.

quotes

...we need to stop putting so many people in jail and divert offenders to other programs as appropriate, programs that may need to be created because we haven’t funded the support systems that make real public safety possible.”

“The City’s jail population has increased rapidly in recent months, reaching pre-pandemic levels of more than 1,100 on any given day. This, supervisors said, is at least in part due to increased arrests and crackdowns on public drug use and dealing on the City’s streets as ordered by Mayor London Breed several times over the past two years.We knew that we had a workforce crisis in the sheriff’s office; we’ve known this for so long … We knew that this effort to arrest not only dealers, but drug users, was going to lead to a much larger jail population of very sick people,” said Supervisor Hillary Ronen during the hearing at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting. “We knew we had a severe budget crisis coming … So my number one question is: What was the plan? Ronen said that the plan to ramp up arrests came as a collaboration between the mayor, the district attorney, and the police department;” -Understaffed, overcrowded SF jails reach crisis point - “Fifty percent of the people in jail are Black — that stat should tell everyone exactly what’s going on.” by Eleni Balakrishnan, Mission Local May 14, 2024.

That is not a problem that’s going to be solved by hiring more police. Public safety has many dimensions, and one of them is providing the resources to make jails a place of actual rehabilitation, not the dehumanizing experience we have now. Also, it’s expensive to put people in jail. The courts, judges, attorneys, staff, police and sheriffs all cost money. And that’s before you even get to the jail. Ideally, jail should be a place where a young, poor person of color (because that’s who is in the jails) can begin to turn their life around, where they can get counseling and contacts on the outside, a place where job opportunities, housing and educational options are made available. That is not what we have now, to put it mildly. Things are so bad that they can’t even keep order; both inmates and guards are being assaulted.

Most importantly, we need to stop putting so many people in jail and divert offenders to other programs as appropriate, programs that may need to be created because we haven’t funded the support systems that make real public safety possible. That’s if you actually want public safety and not just a knee-jerk reaction of “lock ‘em up” and “more police.” That is only kicking the can down the road for someone else to deal with in the future. That is what Mayor London Breed and District Attorney Brooke Jenkins have been doing: kicking the can down the road. You can’t just put people in jail and forget about them, as some politicians seem to think.

When people talk about defunding the police, they are talking about shifting some of the budget toward funding programs to meet public safety needs. It means putting money into programs like homeless outreach, counseling, medical treatment referrals, housing placement, and connecting people to social services. These are not services that are best performed by the SFPD. The SFPD needs to focus on violent crime, property crime and drunk drivers; not be tasked with dealing with people who need counseling, housing and support services. Not people who may be on the street just because they haven’t been able to pay the rent.

“Defund the police.” Right-wing billionaires like William Oberdorf (a major funder of the Chesa Boudin recall) and “so called” moderate groups like GrowSF and TogetherSF (also backers of the Chesa Boudin recall) go crazy over this. Someone even put up a billboard on Geary during the November election about Connie Chan defunding the police. Supervisor Chan made real efforts to advance public safety. But all her “moderate” opponents can do is repeat their tired old mantra of fear-mongering and political opportunism. They are not interested in public safety except as a campaign slogan. Not that there ever was any de-funding of the police; the police budget has gone up every year.

A recent article in the Examiner, (Four historic SF groups band together to reimagine community safety by Greg Wong, Nov 28, 2024) that addresses the issue of public safety in the Chinese community. It says in part:

“The crux of their advocacy centers on a restorative justice approach to safety, which leans on humanizing and rehabilitating violent-crime perpetrators while also centering survivors, victims and the community at large.”

Another example:

“The Miss Major Alexander L. Lee TGIJP Black Trans Cultural Center provides housing and supportive services, job training, and mental health programs to system impacted community members. These evidence-based interventions improve public safety by addressing the root causes of crime—a lack of affordable housing, income inequality, and inaccessible healthcare. When people are better connected to what they need, like a place to stay and a way to make a living wage, they are less likely to commit crimes.” - Prison—or programs that actually work? by eli dru, 48 Hills, October 30, 2024

For the record, Chesa Boudin favored a restorative justice approach, which is an effective and humane way to address community safety. but William Oberdorf, a Republican billionaire, thinks he knows better.

“Over the past two years, Oberndorf has been the biggest donor to the Neighbors for a Better San Francisco super PAC, which has spent just over $1.8 million on pushing the Boudin recall, of which over $900,000 came from Oberndorf.” - Who is William Oberndorf, the Republican billionaire backing the Chesa Boudin recall campaign in San Francisco? By Eric Ting, SFgate, April 8, 2022

 

Are the police making the best use of their time to promote public safety? This year, sixty-five officers were at the Dolores Hill bomb event. They stood and watched while teenagers rode their skateboards down Church Street. Police overreach at the Dolores Hill bomb last year, when teenagers with skateboards were arrested—for being on Dolores Street—has resulted in multiple lawsuits against the City. We all pay the price for police misconduct. Lawsuits aside, Could the police make better use of their resources? More resources need to be devoted to crime prevention measures like foot patrols, bicycle patrols, and squad car patrols to help deter crime before it happens.

Of course, every City department should be fully funded and staffed, but when you talk about funding the police you need to talk about funding the jails. Maybe “fund the jails” is not as catchy a slogan as “fund the police.”

David Romano

David Romano is an environmental activist living near Ocean Beach

December 2024

David Romano.
David Romano

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