Supervisors Take Action on Jail Crisis at Long Last

It has been 18 months since the Board of Supervisors declared that the overcrowding of county jails had reached the crisis stage. In the intervening time, there has been much discussion and debate over how to resolve the problem, and there has been an unsuccessful attempt to pass a tax increase to build additional jails and courtrooms.

But in the past two weeks, the supervisors have taken the first positive steps to ensure some relief for the bloated jail system, voting early this month to shift nearly $7 million from other county programs to build a 600-bed temporary men’s facility and voting last week to place it in Santee.

To be sure, the decision is not without controversy, as residents of Santee are outraged by the fact the jail is to be built next to the Las Colinas Jail for women in the downtown section of their city. The City of Santee may well file a lawasuit seeking to block the construction.

The situation is definitely not an optimum one and underscores how unfortunate was the voters’ failure to approve by a two-thirds margin last November’s tax-increase referendum, which would have provided about $375 million over its five-year life. Because of that failure, the supervisors were left with a deteriorating set of circumstances and few good alternatives.

In June, Sheriff John Duffy told the supervisors that the county’s six jails had become so overcrowded that he needed to hire more deputies to staff them or else he would reduce the inmate population by releasing some prisoners into the community. The jail population has at times reached 180% of rated capacity, and some jails have housed more than three times the number of prisoners they were built for.

The supervisors’ response was to make the painful decision to instruct Chief Administrative Officer Norman Hickey to find enough money in his budget to fund the temporary men’s jail. To do so, he had to impose a 1% across-the-board cut in most departments and trim another $4.7 million from 23 county programs and departments. The supervisors then made the further tough decision to locate the temporary facility in Santee, rejecting a proposal by East County Supervisor George Bailey to put it in the eastern portion of Otay Mesa because that would have taken about a year longer than building at the Santee site.

The board has also asked Hickey to identify an additional $20 million in cuts that could be made to provide more money for jail construction and operation.

That may be asking too much for one budget year. It would seem to make more sense to set aside some money in the coming budget year and give Hickey a full 12 months to scale back programs and come up with the remaining necessary funding.

The supervisors are right to take decisive action now on the jail crisis. But they should not rend numerous important programs in order to do so.