A Billion Dollar Jail Expansion in Sacramento Will Cost More Than Money

By Giselle Garcia ’23, Legal Fellow for the Aoki Center for Critical Race and Nation Studies

In July 2018, six named plaintiffs filed a federal class action complaint, Mays v. County of Sacramento, against the County of Sacramento in representation of a class of incarcerated individuals seeking improvements to the dangerous conditions in Sacramento County Jail. These are their names and stories:

Mays Consent Decree

According to the adopted Consent Decree filed on June 2019, attorneys for the plaintiffs, Disability Rights California and Prison Law Office, and attorneys for the defendant, Cooley LLP and Howard Rome Martin and Ridley, negotiated the terms of a Remedial Plan for the County of Sacramento to address the issues alleged in the complaint. The following are a few of the stipulations included in the Remedial Plan:

• Custodial and health care staff must be increased to meet minimal constitutional and statutory standards. Reduction in jail population is a cost-effective means to achieve constitutional and statutory standards. If the County fails to fulfill the provisions of this Plan due to staffing deficiencies, the parties agree to confer regarding jail population reduction.
• The County will comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act by:
  • implementing an ADA tracking system to screen and track incarcerated individuals with disabilities and needs for accommodations,
  • provide incarcerated individuals with needed health care appliances and assistive devices (including reading glasses),
  • individuals with disabilities must have equal access to programs available to those similarly situated without disabilities,
  • implementing a disability-related grievance process and provide a prompt response and equitable resolution.
• The County will establish policies and procedures to provide adequate mental health care.
• When confronted with the possible use of disciplinary measures and force for incarcerated individuals with disabilities, the County’s policies must require a meaningful consideration of the relationship between exhibited behavior and any mental health or intellectual disability, the efficacy of disciplinary measures versus alternative interventions, and the impact such measures would have on the individual’s health.
• The County must have sufficient staffing to meet professional standards of medical care, provide screening to incarcerated individuals upon arrival, and ensure Health Service Requests are readily available to all—including those in segregation housing.
• The County must establish comprehensive review and suicide assessment, monitoring, and prevention practices to address the risk of suicide and self-harm among the jailed population.
• The County must review its segregation, restrictive housing policies to ensure incarcerated individuals with disabilities are not placed in more restrictive settings based solely on mental illness or any other disability.

Chief Magistrate Judge Kendall J. Newman, for the U.S. District Court, Eastern District of California, signed the proposed consent decree into effect in October 2018.

Jail Population Reduction v. Expansion

One of the introductory stipulations in the consent decree states: all parties agree that if costs are too high jail population reduction must occur. However, instead of implementing a focused plan to reduce the jail population, the County of Sacramento has tried to expand the jail through two costly annex construction proposals. In early 2019, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors first proposed an $89 million jail expansion arguing it was needed to comply with the requirements of the Mays Consent Decree. Community members in Sacramento campaigned against this proposal, frequently holding the Board overtime due to a mass presence during public comment. In 2021, the Board of Supervisors voted not to move forward with the jail expansion proposal. Then in December 2022, reintroduced and approved the so-called mental health annex for $450 million dollars. To make matters worse, the Board voted 3-2 on August 8, 2023 to approve a new estimate of $654 million dollars and secured $925 million in bond debt to account for higher expenditures—a tremendous cost for a county whose entire budget for the fiscal year is $8.4 billion. The Board’s justification for such an expense is compliance with the Mays Consent Decree.

So why not focus on the stipulation within the Consent Decree to reduce the jail’s population? The County has relied on a report, where it commissioned architectural company Nacht & Lewis to evaluate the Sacramento County Main Jail’s physical capacity to meet the requirements of the Consent Decree. In this report, Nacht & Lewis reached a conclusion stating, “Even reducing the population very substantially, the Main Jail cannot achieve meaningful compliance with the consent decree.” However, Nacht & Lewis was contracted in April of 2020 by the County to design the jail expansion, presenting a conflict of interest. The company’s website features its plans to design the annex, listing it under the category of “Project – Justice.”

Since the Mays Consent Decree went into effect, several monitoring reports have been issued which evaluate progress made on the required stipulations and rate whether each stipulation has substantial compliance, partial compliance, or non-compliance. The report published by Nacht & Lewis has been cited by such monitoring reports referencing limited space and outdated infrastructure as a challenge for compliance. However, these monitoring reports also point to deficiencies the County has failed to address sufficiently or at all, which if implemented can improve conditions now for affected individuals. The Third Expert Monitoring Report on Mental Health Care, states that the County can improve conditions now through extensive cleaning, maintenance and ongoing preventative maintenance to create acceptable environments of care for patients. The Fourth Monitoring Report of the Medical Consent Decree, recognizes spatial limitations at the Jail, but because building a new facility would take years, it emphasized an urgency for interim measures and argued many deficiencies could be corrected with an increase in staffing.

Where does this leave the reduction of the jail’s average daily population? The County of Sacramento’s revised Jail Population Reduction Plan was drafted for the implementation of recommendations that would reduce the jail’s Average Daily Population (ADP) by nearly 600 within two to three years. The Sacramento County Public Health Advisory Board’s most recent report includes the Jail’s current ADP rates. In December 2022, the ADP was at 2,938; this fell substantially in January 2023 to 2,558. Unfortunately, there has been a steady rise leading to an ADP of 3,072 as of June. Progress is not yet evident seven months after the County issued their revised plan.

The County is correct in recognizing the conditions in the Sacramento County Main Jail are abhorrent. Conditions in the Sacramento County Jail were too unbearable for Cody Garland, one of the six named plaintiffs. When facing charges for allegedly hitting a correctional officer in the jail he begged his public defender to secure a felony charge so he could go to a state prison, where conditions and medical treatment are better. In an interview Cody recalled, “’They wanted to give me six months in jail, I said I’d take two years if you’d just let me go to prison.” Cody is still in prison today.

Jail Population Demographics

But is building an almost $1 billion jail annex the solution? The Sacramento County Public Health Advisory Board’s Adult Correctional Health Updates Report data of the jail’s population can provide us with insight:

• 33% of monthly intakes involve unhoused individuals.
• 35% of the daily population have chronic physical health conditions.
• 33% of incarcerated individuals have a Serious Mental Illness (SMI) diagnosis and 37% have a Non-SMI diagnosis. That is 70% of incarcerated individuals in the jail have a mental health diagnosis and need to receive mental health services.

The County of Sacramento’s commissioned study on the jail’s population provides the following data:

• 75% of the jail population is pre-trial/unsentenced.
• 70% of the jail population are recidivists.
• 40% of new jail bookings do not involve new crimes and are instead related to probation rules or warrant violations, holds, or court commitment.

Investment in Communities, Not Cages

These population demographics reflect some of Sacramento’s most vulnerable, system impacted individuals and should inspire the County to redirect its $1 billion investment toward community resources that would produce meaningful social change. These resources include affordable housing, health care (with substance use and mental health care), employment, education, and reintegration services, which serve to both prevent harmful behavior and reduce recidivism. For example, there is a relationship between stable housing and an unlikelihood to interact with the penal system. Conversely, being unhoused can often lead to offenses for survival, citations and arrests due to policies criminalizing homelessness, and less access to treatment of mental health diagnoses can manifest into harmful behaviors. Instead of a jail expansion, the County should invest in providing access to stable housing and decrease its current 33% monthly intake rate of unhoused individuals at the Jail.

Instead of a jail expansion, the County can also allocate funding towards providing access to community health care programs to decrease its percentage of incarcerated individuals with mental health diagnoses—currently at 70%. The Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research published a policy brief highlighting that access to mental health care services leads to crime-reduction, and to the contrary, individuals with a history of mental illness are more likely to be incarcerated within two years of losing access to health care. Yet, instead of allocating funding toward holistic preventative measures like housing, food, education, and health care—all which promote the physical and mental wellness needed to sustain a healthy, integrated lifestyle within society—the County of Sacramento chooses to invest in incarceration.

Incarceration is inherently harmful to people’s health and life prospects, and its effects do not end upon release. The trauma inflicted on individuals while incarcerated causes high rates of PTSD, aggravates physical and mental health diagnoses, which in addition to structural barriers during attempted reintegration can lead to harmful behaviors and recidivism. The collateral consequences of incarceration also profoundly impacts families and communities at large, exacerbating poverty and weakening social relationships at the point of incarceration, during, and after.

Conclusion

The costs of jails and prisons do not end after their construction. Facilities for the imprisonment of our community members are inherently economically unsustainable without exploitative practices and inhumane conditions; they are a vacuum for funds only leading to the enrichment of those who build and maintain them. Most importantly, we must look beyond the exorbitant financial cost of this facility and look towards the social costs of incarceration—how the effects of the human rights abuses which occur behind those concrete walls always bleed out into our communities and the proliferation of violence cannot end. This is what a jail expansion will cost the County of Sacramento.