Sacramento Sheriff Jim Cooper is mismanaging the jail and impairing care for inmates | Opinion

Since 2018, Sacramento County and the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department has been embroiled in a class-action lawsuit — Mays v. Sacramento — based on the human rights violations and inadequate healthcare provided in Sacramento County jails. This lawsuit led to a consent decree (a type of court order where the county makes legally-binding commitments to implement changes in order to meet minimum standards of treatment for people incarcerated in the jails).

Unfortunately, the county is consistently falling short of these requirements, and the jail is still a dangerous place for those locked inside.

I have had a front-row seat to the crisis in our jail. As a physician, I have received critically ill and injured ER patients from jail who tell me how they are routinely mistreated and denied medications when they are incarcerated. This crisis is immediate and dire for those impacted.

Opinion

The recent wave of opioid overdoses in the jails is particularly heartbreaking and infuriating, especially because it is so preventable. The sheriff openly disregarded formal requests to implement screening procedures for his staff, frustrating efforts to interrupt smuggling networks. Harm reduction programs have not been implemented, despite robust evidence of their success in other jails and prisons. Court-appointed monitors have repeatedly cited the “inadequate evaluation, treatment and monitoring of patients with substance use disorders.”

Instead of taking accountability, Sheriff Jim Cooper has chosen to obscure the truth about his department’s noncompliance with their legal obligations and deflect blame for the issues inside the jails. He chose to scapegoat the under-resourced and overworked medical staff, demeaning them by labeling them “inept.”

Cooper then had the audacity to request that the jail’s health services be placed back under his office’s control. Health services were intentionally moved out from under the Sheriff’s Department in 2018 because the sheriff’s policies and practices have been consistently identified as a central problem in the county’s chronic noncompliance with the Mays consent decree. Sheriff Cooper’s unwillingness and inability to comply with the legal requirements of an active federal lawsuit should make his request to manage the medical unit embarrassing and nonsensical at best, and a malicious power grab at worst.

Sheriff deputies are not medical professionals, and they should never be in charge of making medical decisions. However, the Sacramento Sheriff’s Department has a long history of making decisions that obstruct the delivery of healthcare. Court-appointed investigators reported sheriff staff unilaterally canceling or delaying medical visits, including recently preventing a pregnant woman from attending a scheduled obstetrical appointment. There are pervasive, well-documented examples of sheriff staff postponing specialty care, overriding physician orders, cutting corners on required medical screenings, ignoring medical evaluation requests, neglecting psychiatrically ill patients and skipping entire days of medication distributions.

This undermining of medical professionals and obstruction of constitutionally-mandated medical care should never occur, and yet it has become routine in Sacramento County jails.

Sheriff Cooper misrepresents the root causes of Sacramento’s failed jail system. His words and actions are petty political stunts that distract from the urgency of addressing these deadly serious issues. The county will not be able to meet its legal obligations without meaningfully reducing the jail population. This was reiterated once again in a recent letter from the consent decree lawyers, yet they continue to postpone implementation of any serious population reduction plans, and the jails remain dangerously overcrowded.

When my patients are incarcerated, I fear for their well-being. There are clear patterns of neglect and inhumane treatment occurring in the jails, and the cause is clear: the Sheriff’s Department is mismanaging the jail and actively impairing the healthcare team’s ability to provide care and keep people safe.

Medical staff can’t do their jobs in a building managed by deputies who don’t prioritize the dignity or well-being of people in their care. Under no circumstance should the sheriff’s office be placed in charge of healthcare within the jails; this care needs to remain the responsibility of medical professionals.

Instead of undermining the jail’s medical providers, the sheriff needs to devote his energy to ensuring that his staff are doing everything in their power to facilitate healthcare delivery and maintain the health and safety of the incarcerated people that are his responsibility.

Dr. Phillip Summers, MPH, is an emergency and addiction medicine physician who sits on the Sacramento County Public Health advisory board, where he has co-chaired the correctional health working committee.