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For more than a year now, reports from inside the San Francisco County Jails have revealed terrible conditions.
Under previous sheriffs Mike Hennessey and Ross Mirkarimi, reporters were allowed to visit the jails; I went with Mirkarimi to the San Bruno facility, and back then it was a pretty chill jail, as they go. Inmates had activities every morning: His school GED or community college classes, yoga, meditation, bicycle repair … they were out of their cells and learning skills that would help keep them from coming back. In the afternoon, they could hang out in a day room, play cards, socialize, go to an indoor gym that was both a basketball and a soccer room.
I walked around with a deputy in an open room filled with inmates and never felt as if violence was about to start.
Even San Quentin now allows reporters in on occasion.
Today, journalists don’t go to the San Francisco jails, so it’s hard to get a first-hand look at what’s really going on.
That’s why it’s important that the Department of Police Accountability, along with the Sheriff’s Office and the Public Defender’s Office, did what should have been standard practice: They surveyed prisoners on a wide range of issues.
More than 40 percent of the people locked up in San Francisco responded, meaning it’s a legitimate sample. Almost one in every three reported a serious injury while in custody, and 36 percent said the fear violence and that the deputies can’t protect them.
The jails are in lockdown much of the time these days, and 93 percent of the inmates said the lockdowns interfered with their free time. Almost 70 percent said the justification for lockdowns was inadequate and unclear, and almost 20 percent said they are experiencing lockdowns—when everyone is confined to a small cell—every single day.
This is a radical change from just a few years ago.
Some of it may be linked to the current sheriff, Paul Miyamoto, who, unlike his two predecessors, is a career law-enforcement person who never claimed to be a reformer.
But there’s another critical element that the survey doesn’t discuss: This mayor and district attorney, in their crusade to “clean up the streets,” have overloaded the jails with people who are suffering from severe mental illness and drug addiction and are not getting adequate (or any) treatment in the overcrowded and understaffed facilities.
It’s simple and obvious: You can’t use the jails as detox, recovery, and mental-health treatment facilities when the staff members are not trained in those areas. You can’t just lock everyone up and look the other way as the impacts of those policies on people who are innocent until proven guilty fester in the city’s custody.
Remember: The vast majority of people in the SF county jails have not been convicted of anything. They are locked up awaiting trial—and because DA Brooke Jenkins has resisted diversion and alternatives to incarceration, the numbers keep growing.
There are human impacts to the policies Daniel Lurie and Jenkins have implemented. We may not see them on the streets as much—but we are seeing them in the jails.
And the Chron, which was happy to attack relentlessly former DA Chesa Boudin and praise the mayor for making the city cleaner, hasn’t reported a word on this new survey.
I would encourage members of the Board of Supes who say they love what Lurie is doing to go spend a night in County Jail in San Bruno. Might be a bit of a wake-up.
