County votes to spend nearly $1B on jail expansion, over powerful protests | Opinion

What would you do with almost a billion dollars?

On Tuesday night, three of the five Sacramento County Supervisors voted to begin a process that will cost residents $1 billion in the coming years to expand the County’s main jail and provide a mere 100 new beds in a mental health facility — in spite of more than three hours of spirited public comment, all of it entirely in protest.

This is, by far, the largest debt the county has ever taken on. It also forces county leaders to prioritize funding jail construction over health services and housing. The existing jail is the most expensive and least effective place to comply with a court decree to provide mental health services to inmates who need it. There are such better options if the county would only try.

Supervisors Patrick Kennedy and Phil Serna deserve credit for challenging staff and voting against the two agenda items, which now authorize a $654 million mental health annex at the downtown jail and also approves overall county expenditures of up to $925 million.

Residents who showed up to protest the vote were quick to draw data-driven connections between incarceration, mental illness and homelessness. They criticized the county for failing yet again to prioritize preventative measures shown to prevent incarceration and recidivism.

But neither logic nor heartfelt pleas had a place in that boardroom Tuesday night.

This was a fear-based decision by the supervisors, running scared from a threatened federal receivership. The county has been hopelessly out of compliance with a 2018 federal consent decree, the result of a class-action lawsuit seeking better treatment of prisoners with disabilities.

The county is bound by law to prove they are moving toward a solution to those findings, and the board clearly felt they had no other option but to vote to move forward.

“We all agonize over this,” said Board Chair Rich Desmond. “I certainly do and that turns my stomach, but (it) seems a very dangerous road to go down when we don’t have a plan B.”

I don’t feel good about this, I don’t want to do it, but I will move to approve,” voted Supervisor Pat Hume.

With that, Sacramento residents are now saddled with a billion-dollar debt that very likely won’t do much to improve the conditions in a jail that is terrible for inmates, the people who work in the facility and a downtown Sacramento community plagued by the crime and homeless conditions exacerbated when county jailers turn prisoners loose in Sacramento’s urban core.

Residents who showed up in person and via phone to the meeting pleaded with the supervisors to vote against the proposal, or at least delay it a few more weeks.

“This is the largest bond the county has ever entered into and it’s not for housing, it’s for a jail,” said Liz Blum co-founder of Decarcerate Sacramento, which joined with nearly two dozen other organizations in a letter meant to protest the county’s vote. Their warning largely fell on unlistening ears.

The mentally ill deserve targeted, sustained care from community-oriented social services, which would have overwhelmingly benefited from this level of monetary support by the county. That money could have instead been used to fund an outpatient, community-based site with probably safer and better outcomes for the county’s inmates; or how about just a new facility built somewhere else in the county, rather than spending hundreds of millions to create an annex to the existing jail?

The greater Sacramento community deserves county leaders who do more than simply give in to a terrible idea that will cost a billion dollars. Annex or no annex, the downtown jail will remain a nightmare. Imagine if the county directed the same amount of bond money toward housing projects and mental health programs.

A community’s budget is a reflection of its principles. The sight of so many people begging the supervisors to reconsider a no-win decision should have communicated that spending nearly $1 billion to further expand an inhumane and inefficient jail does not represent the values of the Sacramento community.

This story was originally published August 10, 2023 at 5:00 AM.