Santa Barbara County is proposing a significant downsizing of its Main Jail near Santa Barbara and expanding the new Northern Branch Jail near Santa Maria to replace some of those beds.
The Board of Supervisors will be deliberating on the path forward at Tuesday’s meeting.
This discussion has been a long time coming.
The historically overcrowded Main Jail, at 4436 Calle Real, is in dire need of maintenance and accessibility improvements from a federal class-action lawsuit settlement.
It has 751 rated beds but, before the COVID-19 pandemic, frequently operated with average daily populations in the 800s. The extra people had to sleep in plastic tub-like “boats” on the floor of housing units.
The county pursued and received state funding to help build the Northern Branch Jail to alleviate the overcrowding, and that 376-bed facility opened in January 2022 at 23o1 Black Road.
Construction took a lot more time and money than expected, and the state’s $80 million contributed to what became a $120 million project.
Now that it’s open, county leaders are turning their attention to the future of the Main Jail, with talk of renovations and millions of dollars’ worth of deferred maintenance.
The county’s conceptual plan is laid out in a staff report for Tuesday’s meeting: reduce the Main Jail bed capacity to 128 beds from 751, and keep it available as a booking and arraignment facility.
It means some people arrested and attending court in Santa Barbara would have to be transported to and from Santa Maria.
It would also “generate some operational savings that could be invested in debt service to construct new capacity at the Northern Branch Jail,” county staff said in a report to the supervisors.
The County Executive Office recommends building a “pod” of 256 beds at the Northern Branch Jail, for an estimated $76 million. This would reduce the overall jail population capacity to 728 from 1,095.
The new total would be two dozen fewer beds than the county had for decades before the new jail was built.
The Board of Supervisors is being asked to direct staff to go ahead with the minimized renovation plan at the Main Jail and work up design plans for new construction at the Northern Branch Jail.
Initially, the county planned a major renovation at the Main Jail to keep it as the larger-capacity facility, but an analysis determined that “to renovate each of the primary housing areas would be cost prohibitive,” according to the staff report written by Assistant CEOs Jeff Frapwell and Tanja Heitman and General Services assistant director Patrick Zuroske.
The Northern Branch Jail cost about $21 million to operate in its first full year, and the whole custody system costs about $90 million.
The newer facility is designed to be operated safely with fewer custody staff, partly because meals and services are brought directly to housing units rather than people escorted around the facility every day.
There are cells with beds, common areas with seating areas and phones, and “yards” (which have high walls and roofs) integrated into each housing unit.
The County Executive Office and criminal justice department leaders have pursued safe ways to reduce the jail population, and implemented many of these programs just in the past few years.
Among the initiatives are diversion programs, holistic defense through the Public Defender’s Office, pre-trial release from custody and alternative sentencing.
As the former chief probation officer, Heitman knows these efforts intimately, and brings that knowledge to the County Executive Office as the person managing public safety and health and human services departments.
The daily average population in custody dropped during the pandemic due to policy changes and booking restrictions, but has increased again.
The last year’s worth of data from the Sheriff’s Department dashboard shows daily population numbers below the system’s capacity of 1,095.
Before the final design for this project, criminal justice agency leaders working on these efforts “should be prepared to report out on their progress and provide population projection analysis to ensure their strategies will sufficiently decrease the population to achieve targets prior to the closure of significant portions of the Main Jail,” the CEO staff report says.
The county’s criminal justice leadership includes officials with the Sheriff’s, District Attorney’s, Public Defender’s and Probation departments.
If necessary, the county could build more than one “pod” of housing units onto the Northern Branch Jail, according to the County Executive Office.
“This reduction of capacity, however, is not without concern by some of the criminal justice partners,” the report adds. “The criminal justice partner agencies have achieved significant reductions to the jail population that have persisted well past the lifting of COVID-19 emergency rules and restrictions.
“Nonetheless, the jail continues to house a large number of inmates who would be better served outside of a jail environment, such as those with severe mental illness.”
The Board of Supervisors will also hear about plans for Main Jail improvements to comply with a class-action lawsuit judgment over jail conditions.
Berkeley attorney Aaron Fischer, a class counsel for the Murray v. County of Santa Barbara lawsuit, wrote in a comment letter that the judgment does not require the county to build additional jail beds.
“It requires that the county meet minimum conditions for the people it chooses to incarcerate,” he wrote.
Fischer said the county cannot leave the current jail conditions for years as it pursues construction, and called for at least a temporary improvement measure in the meantime.
“The county must allocate adequate resources for interim measures at the Main Jail, to address several serious, harmful and ongoing deficiencies identified by the Murray Remedial Plan monitoring experts,” he wrote.
“Such issues include access to out-of-cell and outdoor recreation time, provision of timely medical and mental health care in confidential settings, remediation of deficient environmental health conditions, and removal of suicide-related hazards (e.g. attachment points in intake and restrictive housing units).”
Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting starts at 9 a.m. in the Board Hearing Room on the fourth floor of the County Administration Building, 105 E. Anapamu St. in Santa Barbara. It can be viewed live on CSBTV Channel 20 and the county YouTube page.
