Sacramento County must stop torturing mentally ill jail inmates with solitary confinement

Sacramento County has repeatedly failed to come up with a plan to expand its mental health resources and better manage inmates suffering from serious mental illnesses at its jails. In the absence of leadership from the Board of Supervisors, the Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office continues to confine scores of prisoners in a form of extreme isolation called “total separation.”

The conditions are immoral and inhuman, regardless of whether these inmates are dangerous criminals. Under the Mandela Rules, the United Nations regards more than 15 days of solitary confinement as a form of psychological torture.

“No sunlight. No meaningful treatment. No contact with anyone except the person who occasionally evaluated him through his metal cell door,” The Bee’s Jason Pohl and Michael Finch II wrote last week about Sacramento’s jails.

They detailed the story of a man with schizophrenia who was isolated for two months. He kicked at doors and demanded birthday presents before “he stripped naked, stood on a table and put his hands on his hips,” Pohl and Finch wrote. “It was not his birthday. But for the mentally ill inmate in Sacramento’s downtown jail, breaking free of his isolation for a brief moment in January may have felt like a gift.”

The inhuman conditions of this man’s imprisonment are a result of county inaction. Sacramento remains “largely noncompliant” with the terms of a 2019 federal court settlement over the cruel environment at the county’s two jails, according to a recent monitor’s report. The consent decree called for investments in facility upgrades, including the creation of a new medical wing at the jail to house inmates with mental illness.

Nearly 100 people are still in some form of solitary confinement at the main downtown jail, with some cycling back and forth between the health unit and their cells. Dozens of prisoners are caught in a backlog for the intensive treatment program.

“These serious problems cannot be addressed without a significant reduction of people with serious mental illness in the jails or a substantial expansion of mental health resources in the jails,” the monitor report concluded.

In March, however, the Board of Supervisors scuttled another jail construction proposal for the second time in two years. In November 2019, the board squandered $80 million in state funds to build a new medical and rehabilitation building at the Rio Cosumnes jail in Elk Grove. Sacramento County faced similar criticism in recent months over a proposed medical wing and housing addition downtown. Supervisors again sided with activists who viewed the new facilities as an expansion of mass incarceration.

“Critics of the plan argued that the county could find more immediate ways to bring relief to inmates,” Pohl and Finch wrote.

Yet Sacramento County and its network of service providers clearly do not have enough resources to meet the soaring demand. The Carey Group, a consultant hired by the county to help identify alternatives, said last year that “the system is currently overwhelmed.”

“Until the community can set up adequate services for individuals with mental health needs, these individuals will continue to penetrate the justice system,” the group wrote. “In turn, the justice system must provide treatment services for this population even though they would be better served in the community.”

Some anti-jail activists oppose any expansion of jail facilities, but county supervisors have failed to propose any alternatives to alleviate the grave human suffering afflicted on mentally ill people in the Main Jail. The latest inaction will result in serious consequences for the vulnerable people currently behind bars.

“To move forward with structural reforms in a way that accepts people as collateral feels disturbing,” said Keramet Reiter, an associate professor of criminology and law at UC Irvine. “Figuring out how to ameliorate the really terrible conditions seriously mentally ill people, in particular, are in … and treating them humanely, to me is a step in reframing the system.”

Supervisors blame former CEO Nav Gill for offering the jail annex as the only viable solution to the problem. But rejecting that lone option sent Sacramento back to square one. County spokesperson Kim Nava said the county is planning to hire yet another consultant “to determine the maximum number of inmates that can be housed in the Main Jail under the terms of the consent decree without the construction of the annex.

“Officials are having to rethink in a significant way how to approach those issues.”

Our elected county officials have spent years trying to “rethink” the issue. The latest delay is worsening an already unconscionable situation. It’s time for Sacramento’s supervisors to put a real solution on the table and take action to fix the inhumane conditions festering in the Sacramento jail.

If they can find a way to house dangerous but mentally ill people outside of jail in a way that also protects public safety, great. If it turns out that building a new medical facility is the best solution, county leaders must have the courage to buck unrealistic expectations and do what’s necessary to alleviate the shocking inhumanity taking place inside this county jail.