The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors is contemplating whether or not to construct a brand new $400 million jail. (Randy Vazquez/ Bay Space Information Group)
The Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors is deciding if our county ought to put money into constructing a brand new jail. Presently, the county jails roughly 2,500 folks, disproportionately Black and Latinx, at a price of $400,000 per day. Time spent in jail worsens an individual’s psychological well being, and based on a 2016 grand jury report, 40-50% of the boys and 80% of the ladies in our jail have already got psychological sickness.
As medical doctors working in San Jose, it's straightforward for us to see why the county jails worsen our sufferers’ well being. When an inmate has an emergent psychological well being disaster, jails might need to attend months earlier than a hospital mattress turns into out there due to our county’s important scarcity of psychological well being infrastructure, generally with tragic penalties.
Michael Tyree, an inmate with psychological sickness on the jail in downtown San Jose, died in 2015 after being crushed by three guards who had been finally convicted of homicide. Throughout a psychological well being disaster in 2018, Andrew Hogan suffered accidents that left him with everlasting disabilities, resulting in a $10 million settlement for his household that the county should pay.
For these not in disaster, time spent in jail can exacerbate their psychological well being. Bettering well being requires multidisciplinary care groups, group assist and the mix of individualized counseling with remedy administration. None of this may be supplied adequately in a jail. As County Sheriff Laurie Smith succinctly summed it up, “Jails usually are not the place for individuals who have severe psychological well being points.”
Regardless of the adverse well being impacts of incarceration, 85-90% of present inmates are held in pretrial detention, which means they haven't been convicted of against the law and are being compelled to attend in jail for his or her day in courtroom. Our county presents restricted pretrial providers that permit sure folks to return to the group as an alternative of staying in jail in pretrial detention. In recent times these providers have led to a lower in our jail inhabitants by greater than 40% from a peak in 2014. Nonetheless, courts decide eligibility for pretrial launch with evaluation instruments that drawback the prospect of pretrial launch for folks with psychological sickness and habit. We all know that these populations are notably susceptible to the adverse results of jail, and extra needs to be carried out to get them out and join them to psychological well being providers.
As a substitute of spending as much as $400 million on a brand new jail, we must always put money into the enlargement of psychological well being sources inside our group and the social helps that forestall incarceration like reasonably priced housing and high quality schooling. We must also develop entry to pretrial providers for these with psychological sickness and habit and commit to really supporting these folks as members of our group.
These are bold commitments that require imaginative and prescient and management in Santa Clara County. The constructing of a brand new jail as an alternative additional criminalizes psychological sickness, habit and poverty. We hope that our board of supervisors votes to reject the brand new jail and as an alternative commits to constructing a secure and wholesome Santa Clara County.
Dr. Jack Pollack, Dr. Celina Mercer and Dr. Tara Filsuf are resident household drugs physicians residing and dealing in San Jose.