Contra Costa Co. Clergy, Community Groups Denounce Jail Plans

About 30 people representing faith-based and community organizations gathered today outside the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office in Martinez to denounce its plan to expand a Richmond jail.

Sheriff’s officials say they want to take advantage of a competitive state grant offering up to $80 million, with approximately $10 million in matching contributions from the county, to expand treatment and rehabilitation programs, including mental health services.

Under the plan, high-security inmates would be transferred from the Martinez Detention Facility to the West Contra Costa Detention Facility in Richmond, which currently houses medium-security inmates.

The plan includes the addition of more than 400 high-security beds and roughly 31,500 square feet of space for programming and staff at the Richmond facility, according to a presentation given last month by sheriff’s Capt. Thomas Chalk.

Although the sheriff’s office has long maintained that the project would not increase the size of the jail population, but would free up space for needed programming, critics of the plan are skeptical.

“Even if you convert a double-occupancy cell to a single-occupancy cell, that cell is still big enough to hold two people, so the capacity doesn’t change,” said David Gray, a representative from Richmond Mayor Tom Butt’s office.

Butt, along with Vice Mayor Jael Myrick, City Manager Bill Lindsay and police Chief Chris Magnus, sent a letter dated Aug. 3 to the Contra Costa County Board of Supervisors condemning the plan.

The letter described the plan as “incomplete and pre-mature” and said the sheriff’s office has not done enough to engage city officials and the public in planning the expansion. It also pointed to the lack of a feasibility study or completed needs assessment for the Richmond facility.

“We have always supported real partnerships between the city of Richmond and Contra Costa County, but believe this is the wrong project at the wrong time for our residents and the community,” the letter reads. “The national trend when it comes to jails is towards decreasing bed space in favor of more effective programming alternatives, instead of keeping the status quo, or even worse, expanding jail capacity.”

While many people protesting the expansion outside the sheriff’s office today were supportive of the proposal to add more mental health services for county residents, they were vehemently opposed to those services being housed inside a jail.

“The sheriff says we want to provide more health care services, we want to provide more mental health services and we want to provide reentry services but there’s only one catch,” said Rev. Kamal Hassan of the Sojourner Truth Presbyterian Church in Richmond. “You have to get arrested before you can get them.”

Servant B.K. Woodson Sr., principal clergy organizer for the East Bay Alliance for a Sustainable Economy, said the sheriff’s office should get out of the business of providing mental health services entirely.

“I would feel differently if it were public employees providing health care in a health care facility,” Woodson said. “These are men and women who chose to be law enforcement officers, not nurses and doctors, so we should not ask them to be nurses and doctors.”

The Board of Supervisors is expected to vote on the proposal at its meeting on Aug. 18. The grant proposal is due Aug. 28.

--Bay City News