Sacramento Sheriff: Don’t blame my officers for the inmate deaths at the Main Jail | Opinion

Downtown Sacramento’s Main Jail opened in 1989 and was built to hold over 2,000 people. It was state-of-the-art, likened to a small city with all its amenities, and designed to house low-level inmates sentenced to a year or less in county jail or those awaiting trial. Then, 22 years later, came Assembly Bill 109, which transferred the responsibility of housing some prison inmates to counties throughout California.

Fast forward to 2023, where I’m now Sacramento County Sheriff, inheriting a nearly 35-year-old building that houses state prison inmates and some of the most prolific and sophisticated criminals these walls have ever held, all while under a new Federal Consent Decree. The jail population changed when lawmakers decided to lessen penalties on serious crimes, sending criminals to jail rather than prison, and shifting this burden to sheriffs without providing needed resources or staff to fulfill these mandates.

Opinion

This facility’s conversion to being both a jail and prison for inmates doing sentences is posing an unprecedented security challenge unseen in 1989. These challenges are exacerbated since these inmates can now spend upwards of three to five years in jail — sometimes even longer.

Our jails were not built to serve this population long-term; rather, that was the role of our state prisons: to provide inmates with needed services and programs, including health care and other programs designed to reduce recidivism and encourage rehabilitation.

The Main Jail has been overwhelmed by a far more sophisticated and violent inmate population as well as inmates with acute medical needs. Recent deaths at the Main Jail have garnered headlines, but none have mentioned the root causes of the deaths.

While inmate-on-inmate assaults have been responsible for two significant cases this year, the spotlight needs to be placed on the sheer ineptitude of the county department providing the jail health services, Adult Correctional Health (ACH). It is not a coincidence that most of the deaths at the jail have been medically related. In the past, the sheriff had control of medical care in the facility, but that control was removed before I got here and transferred to ACH, a separate county agency that I have no control over. ACH provides all health care within the jail to the entire inmate population 24/7.

Notably, ACH is one of the top problems cited in the Consent Decree, and I don’t have the authority to fix it.

I don’t make this incompetency allegation lightly. There are numerous examples of poor, substandard medical care. ACH has extensive staffing shortages at all levels, from nurses to physicians, causing ongoing physician staffing issues during nights and weekends. There is also a significant lack of supervision and managerial oversight of staffing. In addition, ACH’s medical director has been on administrative leave since July.

I’d be remiss not to speak about contraband in the facility, including dangerous narcotics, cell phones and tools to manufacture weapons. After taking office and learning of all these issues, I pulled an entire investigative unit from our Centralized Investigations Division to look into it. After the investigation was already underway, lawyers representing inmates demanded a physical search of deputies, which is not standard practice at any jail or prison facility in the state, including the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Our investigation quickly and clearly determined that a civilian employee from ACH was responsible for bringing contraband into the jail. My department is not allowed any involvement in the hiring process of this employee or the process of disciplining or firing the employee.

As the investigation continued, detectives discovered yet another individual trying to bring 40 grams of methamphetamine into the jail. He was scheduled to be remanded in court after being released from jail just days earlier and attempted to smuggle it in before detectives caught wind of it. The problem is multi-faceted, but it does not involve my employees. Criticism of my department by the Prison Law Office has been knee-jerk and not based on reality.

It’s time for a change. I want the inmates to be healthy and get the help they need to get out of jail and become productive members of society, but I need the authority to move high-risk inmates out of our jail to a different, more appropriate facility. If not, there needs to be a better solution to correctional health such as the privatization of health care services in our jails.

Jim Cooper is the sheriff of Sacramento County.