Faith Groups Favor Oversight Over Settlement at Santa Rita Jail
Some 60 churches and faith-based groups in Alameda County are opposing a proposed settlement of a lawsuit seeking better mental health services at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin. The coalition is at the forefront of the push for civilian oversight of the jail and of the Sheriff’s Office that runs it.
The Interfaith Coalition for Justice in Our Jails (ICJJ) and Faith in Action – East Bay, who together initiated the letter, feel that the proposed settlement of the case Babu vs. Alameda County is tilted toward adding deputies at the jail rather than providing more mental health services that would keep more people out of the jail.
That settlement, now being considered by U.S. District Court Judge Nathanael Cousins, would add a new mental-health-services wing to the jail and some 438 new employees.
Of those new employees, 259 would be sworn law-enforcement staff such as deputies, 72 non-sworn law-enforcement staff, and 107 mental health clinicians from the county behavioral health department.
“The settlement would keep Santa Rita Jail the Bay Area’s biggest mental health clinic,” said ICJJ chair Richard Speiglman. “Costly in-custody remedies could come at the expense of addressing wider mental health issues: avoiding people ending up in jail to begin with and then re-entry for those who do,” he added.
The lawsuit is in response to a high rate of inmate deaths at the jail, some of them mentally ill people, in recent years and also complaints by inmates’ families that their most basic mental health needs, such as receiving regularly prescribed medications on time, were not being met.
Another lawsuit by Disability Rights California is pending, raising mental health rights under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act, and an investigation into jail deaths is being carried out by the federal Department of Justice.
Speiglman noted that some 40 percent of Santa Rita inmates have mental health problems and that 25 percent of inmates have severe mental health problems.
The Interfaith Coalition and other jail mental health advocates do fully support the parts of the settlement that would improve conditions for mentally ill people already at the jail, Speiglman said. These include less use of solitary confinement and more time out of their cells each day.
Lt. Ray Kelly, a spokesman for the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, said that law-enforcement personnel needs to be added alongside mental health technicians to keep everybody safe, including inmates.
“Experts have done a tremendous amount of research showing you have to hire them together,” Kelly said. “We need more people to prevent overdoses and suicides.”
Kelly said that the jail does get a disproportionate number of people with mental health issues.
“People commit crimes for all kinds of reasons,” he said, “but some of them have mental health problems that make them commit crimes knowingly or unknowingly.”
In recent years, Kelly said, the state has redirected some of those people away from state courts and state facilities toward local ones, with some coming to Santa Rita.
“County jails have become long-term holding areas for people with all kinds of issues. That wasn’t what they were intended for nor set up for,” Kelly said.
The Alameda County Board of Supervisors is actively seeking public input about establishing either a Community Sheriff's Oversight Board and/or an Office of the Inspector General. A new state law, AB1185, allows counties to have civilian oversight of sheriff’s departments.
An educational seminar on the topic is scheduled for Thursday, January 13 starting at 5:30 p.m. The online meeting will include a presentation by Ms. Cameron McEllhiney, a national expert on the topic of civilian oversight. The event will also include a question-and-answer session for the public.