SF Chronicle | Deputies allegedly tortured mentally ill people at Santa Rita Jail. The answer isn't more deputies
October 4, 2021
By Cat Brooks
While incarcerated at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, Ashok Babu asserts he was held in isolation for 23 hours a day for six weeks in the midst of a mental health crisis, something the United Nations equates with psychological torture. He then spent nearly 15 months on “Intensive Observation Log” status, a form of suicide watch where he was placed alone in a cell with only a hole in the floor to relieve himself. Individuals on this status cannot participate in recreation or programming, are deprived of socks and underwear, and are unable to access toothbrushes or other basic hygiene.
Babu isn’t alone in his treatment. He’s one of eight plaintiffs who sued Alameda County in the 2018. The suit alleges that the jail denied medical treatment and punished those incarcerated for behaviors resulting from their medical conditions.
Rather than go into litigation over these conditions, Babu’s attorneys negotiated a settlement with the county that was made public on Aug. 26. The incarcerated plaintiffs won’t receive any financial compensation from this settlement. Instead, it will force improvements to regional mental health care based on the recommendations of experts who previously worked in the California Department of Corrections and “Rehabilitation” system.
If approved, the settlement mandates Alameda County, its Behavioral Health Services department and the Alameda County Sheriff Office dramatically overhaul their mental health programs and create a new “therapeutic housing unit.” Last month, the presiding judge in the case said he would approve the settlement assuming no significant objections.
Good news, right?
A coalition of advocates, civil rights attorneys, community organizations, incarcerated and formerly incarcerated people say ... No.
Hundreds of objections by incarcerated people have already been gathered and more are being drafted. That’s because rather than investing in mental health services that would prevent incarceration and re-arrest, the settlement resorts to a familiar trick in the Sheriff’s Office playbook: hiring more deputies.
The settlement would add 259 new deputies. Meanwhile, Alameda County would hire less than half that number in new mental health clinicians.
Experts in the Babu case said reducing the jail population is a strategy to relieve staffing shortages, reduce county spending and provide better and more consistent mental health care.
This isn’t even mentioned in the settlement.
Since 2014, 50 people have been killed at Santa Rita. Of those, 19 were labeled suicide.
Nineteen?
Suicide is the most radical expression of mental health crisis that exists, and the sheriff’s department has done an abysmal job of preventing it. According to the Babu complaint, deputies at Santa Rita actively “exacerbate the psychological trauma experienced by prisoners with serious mental health conditions who are housed in isolation.”
Why would we give them more money and more responsibility?
Santa Rita Jail is already the largest provider of mental health services in Alameda County.
Shame on us.
Alameda isn’t the first county to demand shifting mental health care away from law enforcement. In 2019, community organizers successfully pushed the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors to cancel a nearly $2 billion contract to build a jail for prisoners with mental health issues. The community instead shifted the focus and dollars toward community-based mental health treatment and support.
“For decades Los Angeles criminalized people with mental illness,” Patrisse Cullors, one of the lead organizers of that effort and co-founder of Black Lives Matter, told me. “And for decades organizers, educators, artists and advocates pushed to challenge this war against mostly Black and Brown poor disabled folks. Groups like JusticeLA, Reform L.A. Jails and Re-imagine LA successfully stopped the jail plan, but then developed a pipeline of resources away from the carceral system and into alternatives to incarceration.”
While Babu attorneys have argued that pushing this settlement through as soon as possible is the best way to prevent more suicides or other tragedies, many community members argue the opposite is true. They assert this settlement is exactly what Alameda County Sheriff Gregory Ahern wants: more money to hire 259 more deputies while keeping decarceration low on the radar.
Alameda County certainly does need a new mental health facility. But, just like Los Angeles, we need one not rooted in incarceration and criminalization.
Jails should not be in the business of providing mental health services. (Jails really shouldn’t be in business at all. A girl can dream)
People incarcerated at Santa Rita need counseling and mental health care that promotes emotional stability — not the cocktail of psychotropic meds currently used to medicate prisoners into compliance. Accomplishing this will require extending the time frame for final settlement approval beyond 90 days, transparent monitoring, allowing community members and incarcerated people to testify with their concerns, to strike additional deputies from the settlement and assert the need for community-based mental health in a revised settlement approved by community.
The people who run Santa Rita have shown themselves definitively and repeatedly that they don’t care about, nor are they capable of, taking care of people in crisis. It is unacceptable to continue to subject human beings to this treatment, much less expand it.
Cat Brooks is an award-winning actress, playwright, the executive director of the Justice Teams Network, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project, an advocacy organization that also provides mental health crisis counseling services, and the co-host of UpFront on KPFA.