Prisons and jails are not supposed to be “nice” places. They aren’t supposed to have tons of “amenities.” But they are supposed to be humane. Prisons are technically meant to house people who have been convicted of a crime and—depending on the sentence—will be sequestered from society for a predetermined amount of time. In many cases the people incarcerated are still awaiting their day in court but have lost their personal freedoms until, theoretically, their right to a speedy trial comes to pass.* Those people awaiting trial or serving very short sentences are supposed to be housed in jails. Since 2016 lawyers representing inmates with disabilities have been mediating with Sacramento County officials to get jails like Sacramento County’s Sacramento County Jail (Main Jail) and their Rio Cosumnes Correctional Center (RCCC) to do the right thing and create something resembling a humane living situation for their population of inmates.
Flaps placed over the small “windows.”
According to Disability Rights California (DRC) and the Prison Law Office (PLO), conditions at Sacramento’s Main Jail and the RCCC grossly fail to meet even the minimum standards required by the US Constitution and federal law. Representing six inmates, lawyers filed a class action lawsuit on July 31, stating that the jails are “dangerously understaffed,” and fail to provide adequate mental health and medical care.
Defendant regularly subjects people in its custody—the majority of whom have not been convicted of any crime—to harsh, prolonged, and undue isolation. Every day, Defendant locks up hundreds of people in solitary confinement in dark, cramped, filthy cells for 23 ½ hours or more per day. While these individuals are held in isolation, Defendant deprives them of human contact, programming, fresh air, and sunlight. Many people do not get outside to see the sun for weeks or months at a time. The extreme isolation and deprivation place people at serious risk of profound physical and psychological harm.
This all began after a report from the DRC in 2015, that detailed the horrific conditions and practices throughout California’s penal system.
That grate is the toilet.
In the wake of the DRC report, the County retained nationally renowned experts to evaluate its jail health care and correctional practices, its system for suicide prevention, its treatment of people with disabilities, and its use of solitary confinement. These experts found that Sacramento’s County’s jails are “dangerously understaffed,” “wholly inadequate,” and “operate in a state of near perpetual emergency.” Those experts’ reports have been submitted to the federal court in support of the lawsuit.
“The conditions that people with serious mental health needs and disabilities face inside Sacramento County’s jails are beyond the pale,” said Aaron Fischer, Litigation Counsel at Disability Rights California. “You don’t have to take our word for it. The County’s own consultants have condemned the jail system as dangerous, inadequate, and dramatically out of step with contemporary standards.”
Hundreds of people awaiting trial are locked up in solitary confinement, while being refused proper medical or mental health care. Since November 2016, no less than five people have died by suicide while imprisoned in these Sacramento County jails, along with numerous attempted suicides—and the injuries sustained in surviving such attempts. These issues have been exacerbated by Sacramento County jails not simply because of the poor facilities but because of the policy and practices of those facilities.
Here’s their medical unit cell.
The use of segregation in the Sacramento County Jails is dramatically out of step with emerging national standards and practices and with what the research tells us about the dangers of segregation regarding placing mentally ill inmates in segregated housing. The SCSD jails make no provision to exclude the mentally ill from segregation despite the mounting evidence that this population is particularly vulnerable to serious risk of significant harm from such placement. The SCSD overuses segregation both for the mentally ill and the non-mentally ill. Because of the lack of sufficient out of cell time and programming opportunities, conditions in the jails for segregated inmates are very stark and unlikely to meet constitutional standards.
For over two years, advocates for these prisoners worked with the Sacramento County Sheriff’s office, and when asked by the Sacramento Bee, Sacramento’s Sheriff Scott Jones had this to say about why we are where we are today.
For female inmates.
“The Sheriff’s Department has spent countless staff hours working well with DRC and the PLO for the better part of three years, to address their specific concerns as well as adapt to the changing legal landscape of corrections,” Jones said in a statement to The Bee. “Throughout the course of this relationship — with full involvement of County Counsel and County leadership — we had already made some positive changes, and had reached a place of conceptual agreement on most remaining significant issues.
“Unfortunately, the implementation of these changes necessitates substantial resources and it is solely the Board of Supervisors’ decision whether to supply the resources or litigate the issues.”
Sheriff Scott Jones is running for the California House right now and has all kinds of personal misconduct issues to deal with; and his enthusiasm to fix what he did nothing about for about five years before the DRC’s report came out, is probably connected to that run. But, he isn’t wrong. According to the Board of Supervisors, the agreed upon changes would have cost the capital city of California $160 million to implement with a yearly cost of $50 million—something they said they could not budget. Our country has a lot of money to give to already wealthy people but very little money available to them when it comes to everyone and everything else.
*We know that the “right to a speedy trial” clause of the Sixth Amendment is practiced mostly along racial and economic lines, but that is the theoretical ideal we are supposed to labor under.
