Santa Barbara County’s jailhouse population is getting smaller, and it’s likely to shrink even more in the coming years.
The county plans to examine creating a felony diversion program and expanding its misdemeanor diversion efforts to reduce the population of the jail, the Board of Supervisors voted Thursday during a special meeting.
South County Supervisors Gregg Hart, Joan Hartmann and Das Williams voted in favor of the plan, while North County Supervisors Peter Adam abstained and Steve Lavagnino left the meeting early because of a family medical matter.
“We clearly have innocent people sitting in jail,” Williams said.
Williams said it is unacceptable to have 70 percent to 80 percent of the jail population behind bars before they even have a trial. A percentage of those individuals won’t be guilty, he said, and many of them probably qualify for misdemeanor diversion efforts. He also said that not enough people are home with an electronic monitoring bracelet.
“I heard one of the speakers say that electronic monitoring is humiliating,” Williams said. “I think jail is a lot more humiliating. It’s a good alternative for some folks that are convicted.”
Sheriff Bill Brown said he backs diversion programs, but he also has concerns.
“We are certainly very supportive of diversion,” Brown said. “We want to see people diverted from jail, if there is an appropriate diversion that would hold them accountable in another way and continue to protect public safety.”
The jail population is currently about 570.
Brown said 466 people have been released early since March 19, shortly after the COVID-19 pandemic shut down everything. Of those, Brown said, 55 people have been rearrested, or about 12 percent, for about 75 new offenses. One person was arrested three times, another person four times and another five times. Brown noted that those arrests were just in past three months.
He said the community is lucky that it hasn’t had a particularly high-profile criminal case involving someone released from the jail.
“We don’t know at this point what the impact would be” of releasing people from the jail, Brown said. People to whom deputies have given citations could very well be in jail right now, but the court system is so clogged that cases aren’t being reviewed.
He said crime nationally is at a 50-year low, but that it is also cyclical.
“Crime rates are likely to increase,” Brown said. “They have been down for a long period of time, and the likelihood is that it will go up.”
Domestic violence and other relationship crimes are increasing during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.
“These are tumultuous, difficult and uncertain times for county government, our criminal justice system, and especially for the people we serve and indeed for our entire nation,” Brown said.
He added that diversion programs would mean that the Board of Supervisors would have to make leadership decisions related to money.
“There is more potential for diversion, but the reality is it will require additional fiscal human and housing resources, all of which are currently in short supply,” Brown said.
Supervisor Adam said he was disappointed with the tone of the conversation.
“Someday, we are going to be back here, people are going to be complaining about how much crime there is, and you’ve got to remember that Three Strikes came from somewhere,” he said. “It was an answer to really high crime rates and people were complaining at that time. So now, crime subsides a bit and everybody wants to do something else.”
Adam also sparred a bit with Alice Gleghorn, director of the county’s Department of Behavioral Wellness.
Gleghorn said that on any given day, more than half of the people in the jail have a history of mental health issues.
“Even though we have been successful in reducing the number of people in jail, we still have a larger number of people with those needs still locked up,” Gleghorn said.
Further, many of those individuals also have substance abuse problems. She said about half of the people in the jail who have mental health and substance abuse issues first interacted with the county’s justice system before age 18.
“We really do have folks with long-term histories of mental health treatment and substance abuse treatment still in jail at this point in time,” Gleghorn said. “We know jail is not a therapeutic environment. It is not a place for people with mental illness to get well.”
Adam pressed her on statistics that he would like to see that show “tangible results,” from the department’s $134 million budget.
“I don’t know if anybody is any better at the end of it all,” Adam said. “I am very frustrated. I think I have been patient. I have asked for concrete identifiable and disclosable criteria, and I haven’t gotten anything.”
The comment prompted Williams to chime in.
“My brother-in-law is a schizophrenic,” Williams said. “There’s no cure for schizophrenia. The victory is that he is able to live with his mother and not homeless or in jail. That is the victory.”
The board also voted to direct the county CEO’s office to develop performance measures as part of the budgetary authority to reduce the jail population and divert them from the justice system, and ask the CEO’s office to return with the metrics and resource requests to implement those priorities.
The board is also going to ask legislators for relief from the AB 900 Jail Financing Program, which requires that as a condition for accepting state funds for the North County jail that the council maintain a minimum number of jail beds. The board also talked about ways to enhance its awareness of racial equity and justice issues.
Retired Judge George Eskin spoke during the public comment period and said the criminal justice system needs to be reformed. He said the idea that threatening people with punitive consequences will get people to stop committing crimes is wrong.
“That approach has proved to be a failure and extremely costly at the state and local level, resulting in America having the largest prison population in the world and the highest recidivism rate,” Eskin said.
— Noozhawk staff writer Joshua Molina can be reached at jmolina@noozhawk.com. Follow Noozhawk on Twitter: @noozhawk, @NoozhawkNews and @NoozhawkBiz. Connect with Noozhawk on Facebook.
