By Jose Medina
SACRAMENTO, CA – In a clear victory for Sacramento criminal justice reform activists, the Sacramento County Board of Supervisors voted to reject the $10 million opening design plan last week – several months ago it appeared to be a lock to pass – to build a Correctional Health and Mental Health Services Facility, and an eventual a $200+ Million jail annex.
It was a 4-1 vote with Supervisor Sue Frost the only one to vocally support the expansion.
It was a long and controversial journey for the jail expansion project that was meant to address the 2018 Mays v. Sacramento ruling. The lawsuit, filed on behalf prisoners of the County of Sacramento jail system, aimed to address inadequate mental health care, inadequate health care, and understaffing.
What followed about two years ago was the Mays consent decree which required Sacramento county to expand its mental health programs, identify and accommodate people with disabilities, and improve jail staff behavior. This jail expansion project was proposed as a solution to meet the consent decree.
Civil Rights lawyer and founding member of Decarcerate Sacramento, Tifanei Ressl-Moyer pointed out the glaring flaws to this solution stating, “planning to scale up the current jail system before addressing its dangerous conditions is reckless.”
Ressl-Moyer added “this plan anticipates a dramatic increase in the jail population at a time when residents and criminal justice experts are warning the County to urgently do the exact 
opposite: reduce the jail population.”
A good number of call-in comments from constituents expressed their desire for sustainable alternatives to incarceration and asked the Board of Supervisors to not support the jail expansion.
Throughout the night, the community advocated for improving conditions inside the jails, reducing the jail population, changing staff behavior, and providing a voice for incarcerated people.
Jael Barnes, who has a husband in the main county jail advocated on behalf of those inside the jail during the COVID pandemic, said “my husband, suffers from extreme anxiety and has a low immune system, I know he and other people on the inside suffer from mental health issues.”
She added that there are “those who are afraid of receiving their results because they’re afraid of coming up positive and their visiting privileges being revoked.” A clear indication that the pandemic has exacerbated the poor jail conditions.
As if the fear and anxiety incarcerated people face was not enough in the midst of a pandemic, they also have to deal with the inhumane behavior of the jail staff, she said.
While being imprisoned at the Main Jail for three years, Pamela Emanual, recalled “you can be sick for weeks in there and you won’t get any help. I saw three people die preventable deaths right before my eyes. You ask for help inside those walls and it’s a joke to those running the facility.”
Dr. Christina Bourne, who had worked inside the Main Jail recalled how horrible jail staff behavior was saying “I’ve attempted to provide care while working inside our jails, and I routinely saw Sheriffs provoke people in mental health crises—yelling, making fun of them, using racial slurs. The only route to proper care is decarceration and investment in alternatives.”
Earlier, one caller chastised the Board, noting “we spend too much money on things that are wasted in Sacramento jail facilities that do nothing to care for people who actually need the help.”
Reminding the Board that “Sacramento is a high incarceration county because that is the desired outcome system in place which you have the opportunity to change. It’s up to you to change the status quo.”
Lauren Low commented that the jail expansion “does not meet the consent decree, the current conditions are abysmal and I am not confident they will change with this new facility.”
Another caller reflected on the issues at hand and said, “we tend to try to build ourselves out of incarceration issues, by expanding the facility it exacerbates the problem.” and reasoned that “correcting existing problems is where funds should be used as opposed to building new facilities where potentially the existing problems just transition to the new facilities.”
Representing the demands for community care, Raymond Garcia declared “I believe in investing in restorative justice procedures and community care not in punishment facilities that have proven to be ineffective, let’s reallocate that funding into our marginalized communities that are directly affected by incarceration.”
The President of Sacramento NAACP Youth Council, Jaleele Baker called on the Supervisors to “listen with the empathy that is necessary to address this issue rooted in racial discrimination and racial history.”
Baker reminded the Supervisors that “there are many known traumas that are caused by your officers, your jails, your correctional officers that are clearly not best equipped to effectively provide care to folks dealing with mental health issues.”
He asked, “for mental health solutions that are rooted in community care and rooted in evidence based scientific solutions” and considered the jail expansion as “a slap in the community’s face to propose this expansion of mass incarceration prison and extremely uncomfortable living conditions as a solution for mental health communities.”
DJ commented on the plight of incarcerated people who are in pre-trial saying “these are innocent people per the Constitution, their only crime is being too poor to afford cash bail that’s it, if they were rich they would be out, but because we put a price on their freedom, and they can’t afford that price, then they get effectively a guilty sentence without ever seeing a judge or jury.”
Courtney Hansen from Decarceration Sacramento stated “this isn’t just a bureaucratic or financial issue, jail expansion is a racial and social issue it touches everything.” Fifty-five percent of people are in jail for less than a week, with this expansion we won’t have funding to give them anything else that they actually need.”
Another caller rhetorically asked, “after your declaration of racism as a public health emergency, why would you commit taxpayers to invest in a jail system that disproportionately incarcerated Black Sacramento residents?” And added that “there are programs designed to keep people out of jail that actually are working and cost a fraction of the cost of the expansion.”
Matthew called and tried to appeal to the Supervisors’ better nature saying “think for a moment what would it be like to wake up in the middle of the night with people surrounding you vomiting and coughing from COVID? What would you do if you had to choose between spending your precious commissary money on edible food, hygiene, or a call with a family?”
Adding “How would you feel being targeted for speaking out against the conditions of the jail facility you’re in?”
Another caller added “I have a loved one in Sacramento County Jail and every single day I hear horror stories about mistreatment, outright abuse, and regular medical neglect that most recently resulted in my loved one and so many others being infected with COVID-19 due to the jail staff’s negligence, a new building will not stop that, it will still be run by the very same staff.”
Phillip Summers, a Sacramento Emergency and Addiction Physician tended to a patient who was recently booked in the jail. Summers recalled the patient saying the jail was “absolutely filthy, he reported zero social distancing, he was put in a holding cell with 15 other men none of which were offered masks and did not receive his chronic medication.”
Summers indicated that there needs to be “better sanitation and management policies, not a new building.”
A member of Decarcerate Sacramento, Liz Blum, shared that her brother had been incarcerated several times due to mental health crises and stated that his treatment had nothing to do with the structure of the building emphasizing that “a building is just a building, people are dying inside Sac County Jail due to a failure of jail staff and the county is distracted by a new jail.”
Blum advised the supervisors to “listen to the people, listen to the truth, to improve jail conditions, look towards fixing jail staff procedures and better treatment of the people inside.”
Sonia Lewis, a Black Lives Matter co-founder, commented that “there were 10 jail deaths in a 12 month period; this is about a culture of law enforcement and violation of human life, this is not about a building.”
Lewis spoke up for victims of the carceral system, noting “another jail will just perpetuate the culture of violence by law enforcement who continues to by intention and design the most vulnerable in our communities.” adding that “prisons and jails are about profit, and we the people are tired of being human profit.”
Africa Black called in to show their frustration towards the expansion, criticizing the semantics used in proposing the jail expansion as a way to meet the consent decree, arguing “cages do not perpetuate care, just because you changed the language.”
After hours of passionate comments from the Sacramento community it was becoming clear that the jail expansion would not move forward.
Supervisor Phil Serna discerned the strong opposition against the jail expansion and motioned to have the supervisors deny the jail expansion and focus the Boards’ energy towards exploring ways to affect the culture and behaviors of jail facilities.
“The more and more I hear from the community, I can’t cite one constituent that reached out to me and said, ‘I support the jail expansion’; instead, I received hundreds of emails against it,” he said.
Serna initiated his motion to deny the expansion by stating “I don’t feel comfortable making a decision on such a big appropriation for such a big capital investment when I still feel there is still missing information.”
He highlighted the perseverance of the community and stated that they “deserve more time from us and staff to consider how we can affect as much the culture and behavior in the relationship of jailer and prisoner as much as the potential in investing in a very costly facility.”
Supervisor Patrick Kennedy agreed with Serna stating, “I don’t think this is an expenditure that makes sense right now when there are so many things that we could do that would have immediate impact and immediate results without spending the amount of money that we’re talking about, so I too will not be in support of staff recommendation.”
Supervisor Don Nottoli seconded Serna’s motion and agreed to “spend some time looking at recalibrating our approach on how do we, as a Board, help us get to some of the systemic process related issues that affect the cultural aspect of things that either do or don’t happen in our jail facilities.”
Supervisor Sue Frost was the sole supporter of the jail expansion until the bitter end and after reading the room, gave her final remarks on the project, commenting “I am disappointed that after all the work we weren’t able to move forward with this Mental Health and Medical (facility) to improve conditions in the jails.”
Knowing that she was in the minority when it came to supporting the expansion, Frost added “I would have supported it tonight and I know there are many people upset with me for saying this but I think it’s a step forward at a time when we need to find a way to improve the conditions in the jail and live up to the consent decree and so those are my comments.”
Ressl-Moyer, along with Dr. Christina Bourne, a physician who has worked inside Sacramento’s Main Jail, presented evidence that expansion of current infrastructure only makes more space for bad behavior, no matter how state-of-the-art. They say only a comprehensive systems approach will transform medical and mental healthcare policies inside the jail, and promote accountability for all.
The County’s Public Information Officer Kim Nava reportedly told Fox40 that the general plan will be “reducing the jail population,” which is what the Mays v. Sacramento consent decree recommends as the more cost effective way to meet its terms.
Decarcerate Sacramento said more than “two dozen live public commenters, over 100 email comments, and nearly 700 petition signatures all opposed the new jail building that advocates argued would have ensured the continued incarceration of people living with mental illness and disabilities, devastating the county’s General Fund for decades to come.”
“This is a historic moment for our community and for our loved ones inside the county jails. It’s promising to see the board commit to real accountability and change as we move towards building a more humane and equitable Sacramento” said Barnes, an organizer with Decarcerate Sacramento.
“Weeks, months, and years of organizing went into this victory. In less than two years, we stopped two different jail expansion projects from moving forward in Sacramento County” said Blum. “Our coalition continues to fight for the decrease of jail populations and the shift of county funding priorities towards vital community-based care.”
Jose graduated from UC Davis with a BA in Political Science and has interned for the California State Legislature. He is from Rocklin, CA.
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