Members of the Sacramento public spoke out Tuesday night against a proposed annex to the county jail, the latest pushback in a years-long debate over the building.
A consulting group, CGL Companies, was contracted by county leadership in April — for about $586,000 — to conduct a peer review of the latest iteration of the plan. They presented their methodology to the Community Review Commission, an 11-person board tasked with overseeing the Sheriff’s department.
The Intake and Health Annex has been proposed as a way to meet the terms of the Mays Consent Decree, a 2019 legal agreement that charges the county with remedying conditions inside the jail. The building’s projected cost — $654 million, paid for by a $1 billion bond — gave supervisors pause, and prompted the hiring of CGL this year.
CGL Companies Vice President Brian Lee said the group will verify and examine the latest iteration, and try to reduce the size and scope of the project.
“We're creating categories and classifications, going through the program line by line and space by space, and categorizing all of those additions in the program to … make recommendations as to whether or not those fall within necessity to meet the consent decree, or if they're just desired outside of that,” said Lee.
The group, which is based out of Miami, Florida, said they were conducting site visits in addition to gathering data and interviewing stakeholders. Lee said the group would review all pertinent data, including population reduction efforts and alternatives to incarceration, before presenting recommendations to the county.
Members of groups like Decarcerate Sacramento, a grassroots coalition of Sacramento residents that has lobbied against jail expansion in the past, called on CGL to seriously consider whether a building is needed in the first place.
“It's absolutely critical that CGL immediately re-evaluate their explicit goals to prioritize analyzing whether or not a new building is needed at all,” said Liz Blum, co-founder of Decarcerate Sacramento. “Their failure to mention any goal of determining if new construction is required at all is seriously concerning.”
Blum’s comments were echoed in a letter sent by Dr. Corrine McIntosh Sako, chair of Sacramento County’s volunteer Mental Health Board, which advises the Board of Supervisors and the local mental health director.
“Constructing a new jail is not only unnecessary, but would be harmful to current and future
generations of Sacramento County residents as — even with reduced scope — it jeopardizes the fiscal health of the County and the ability to invest significantly in preventative systems of care that promote safety and health for every resident,” she wrote, highlighting a set of recommendations the board recently approved, including a “Care First, Jails Last” policy.
Other speakers shared their experience of time inside the jail.
Sacramento resident César Aguirre, who was jailed earlier this year, said he requested assistance from mental health staff during his time at the county lock-up.
“I did specifically request not to be put in solitary confinement when I was requesting medical and psychiatric emergency, but was given nothing but that,” he said, adding his requests to meet with psychiatric staff went unheeded.
Sacramento resident Sky Lee said she often treats incarcerated people in her practice as a physician, and said she’s struggled to effectively treat them.
“Incarceration is incompatible with healthcare,” she said. “I recently had a patient who declined to go out to chemo because he wanted to make sure he was there for a committee meeting so that he could get to see his family before he died.”
CGL Companies will issue draft recommendations to the county in September or October.
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