By Tracey Kaplan
San Jose Mercury News
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Santa Clara County plans to spend at least $74 million extra on its troubled jails over the next two years to beef up psychiatric care, add more staff and improve training of jail guards -- over a third more than it spent the last fiscal year.
The spending plan, provided at the request of this newspaper, comes in the wake of the August death of a mentally ill inmate, Michael Tyree, who was allegedly beaten by three correctional officers charged with his murder.
County officials, however, maintain they were already working on jail improvements well before Tyree’s death, partly because of pressure from inmate-rights lawyers. They largely blame the recession for forcing them to maintain the jails along with all the other county departments at “minimum levels of service” for years, according to a memo the Board of Supervisors will review at its meeting Tuesday.
“Tyree’s death certainly prompted us to move ahead with some of those fixes faster,” said Gary Graves, the county’s chief operating officer. “We felt it was important to address those gaps sooner.”
But critics blame the county and Sheriff Laurie Smith for failing to do enough prior to Tyree’s death.
“For them to seek cover under the recession is shameful,” said LaDoris Cordell, chairwoman of the blue-ribbon commission appointed by the county Board of Supervisors to study jail conditions and treatment of inmates. “This is about attention not being paid to officers running amok, writing racist texts and beating up people -- and to inmates’ complaints. They need to step up and take responsibility.”
Others have commended the sheriff for reacting to Tyree’s death by quickly arresting the three guards suspected in beating him, reopening multiple use-of-force investigations and spearheading reforms such as a recent ban on the use of plastic bullets by jail guards.
Finger-pointing aside, there’s no question that the county is on track to significantly ramp up the jail budget.
In the fiscal year ending this past June, the county spent $200.1 million to staff and train jail workers, including psychiatrists and other medical personnel. It will spend another $32.2 million the next fiscal year on those expenses and another $42.1 million the year after -- for a total of $74.3 million, or a 37 percent increase over two years.
Those numbers do not include one-time capital projects, including the new jail the county plans to build to replace a 1950s-era facility known as Main Jail South. The new tower is expected to cost the county at least $160 million and the state $80 million. It will have 815 beds, at least a third of which will be for mentally ill inmates.
On Tuesday, the supervisors are also expected to approve a plan to ramp up mental health and substance abuse services in the three jails. Starting with five teams at a cost of $5.8 million this fiscal year, the county plans in the next two years to create 12 teams composed of 59 new employees. Each team would be staffed by a psychiatrist, psychologist, psychiatric social worker, psychiatric nurse and substance abuse counselor.
The idea is to reduce wait times for assessments and appointments, which have stretched as long as eight weeks in some cases; decrease the length of stay and number of admissions to the Main Jail’s acute-care psychiatric unit; decrease suicide attempts; and cut down on the number of inmates who keep returning to jail.
About half of the county’s more than 3,000 inmates are considered mentally ill to some degree, and some stay for years, not months as in the past. In late 2011, California reduced overcrowding in state prisons by transferring responsibility for relatively low-level offenders to counties -- which now have to treat their mental and physical ailments.
Based on recommendations by Judge Stephen Manley, who oversees the mental health court, the county officials are exploring how to increase the number of beds in local residential treatment centers, so they won’t have to use the jails to warehouse petty offenders like Tyree, who was waiting for such a bed. One way under consideration is to allow nonprofits that currently run treatment centers to expand using county-owned facilities. Officials are considering three properties for possible use, including the Muriel Wright Residential Center in Morgan Hill, west of Highway 101.
However, even with the extra space, it will not be easy for community-based organizations to create more beds because they are already having trouble attracting psychiatrists and other medical workers.
Also on Tuesday, the board is expected to approve spending about $372,500 more on a controversial set of jail contracts with the risk-management and litigation avoidance firm Sabot Consulting, for a total of about $835,000.
The firm has already begun assessing the way jails accommodate disabled inmates under an agreement between the county and a San Francisco law firm that threatened to sue over violations of the federal Americans with Disabilities Act by the jails.
Under the new contract and an amendment to an existing contract, Sabot will also assess custody health care, including psychiatric services, and use-of-force policies -- particularly in regard to mentally ill inmates.
Both reports will be confidential, over the continuing objections of jail commission chairwoman Cordell. In November, she threatened to step down from her position, saying the consultant will have better access to county jail personnel, potentially rendering the commission a political sham. Last week, she vowed to write a letter to the supervisors urging them to share the firm’s reports with the public.
“This arrangement (with Sabot) serves no good purpose,” she said. “The county is going to get sued anyway, so they should get out of litigation mode and do this in public.”
County officials have defended the arrangement with Sabot, saying it is the fiscally responsible thing to do since county lawyers expect a wave of lawsuits from inmate rights groups and prisoners’ families. They note that the consultant is well-regarded by the rights groups, including the Prison Law Office in Berkeley, and also say the firm’s work already has spurred jail improvements.
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