By Mark Dempsey
In 2020, the McClatchy family sold its papers, including the Sacramento Bee, to a private equity firm, and its local coverage has taken a downturn. One recent example was the Sacramento County supervisors’ vote to enlarge the County Jail – a move now estimated to cost in the neighborhood of $1 billion.
That supervisors’ vote occurred Aug. 15. The Bee’s coverage announcing that (upcoming) vote began…wait for it…Aug. 16. In other words, unless Sacramentans were following the Supervisors’ published agenda, the vote to expand the jail would have been a complete surprise.
Of course, the supervisors ignored all the public protesters that did appear before that vote, so perhaps reporting in retrospect to encourage preemptive resignation has its uses. The report of the vote’s outcome appeared in the Bee on Aug. 17, two days after the vote.
As someone who gets notified of such votes thanks to the Decarcerate Sacramento organization, I was horrified the supervisors were even considering devoting so much of their budget to cages, so I asked a local American River Democratic club president to publicize the upcoming vote a few days before it occurred. He put the notice on their Facebook page on Aug. 17, too.
So…Bee’s reporting, even reporting from social media, was too late to matter.
One online news service (that covers national and local stories), the Davis-based Vanguard, did report this upcoming vote before it occurred, but the Vanguard is in Yolo County, not Sacramento, where the Sacramento Bee is based.
A little context:
The U.S. is the world’s champion at caging people. With five percent of the world’s population, it incarcerates 25 percent of the world’s prisoners – five times the world’s per-capita average, and seven times the age-demographic identical Canadians. And Canadian crime is insignificantly different from U.S. crime.
In Sacramento, 60 – 80 percent of the prisoners in the County jails have been convicted of nothing except being unable to afford bail. Yep, it’s illegal to be poor in Sacramento. Did supervisors consider modifying or ending cash bail (as Illinois did recently, and as Washington D.C. has done for years now)? Nope.
The impetus for this race to build a bigger cage is the “Mays decision,” a court case the County lost because it mistreated prisoners in jail. The committee the supervisors formed to address the basis for this decision has many recommendations for remedies, but none of those remedies included enlarging the County jail.
Ignoring their own committee, dozens, if not hundreds of protesters, the egregious cost of the project, alternatives like ending or modifying cash bail…all of that was not influential.
And now, local news coverage simply ignores such decisions until it’s too late to change them. It may be good to be king, but it looks pretty similar to be supervisor.
