They sell everything from cookies and microwave popcorn to deodorant and dental floss.
The commissary that serves the 3,800 or so people locked up in San Diego County jails at any given hour generates millions of dollars a year in profits for the Sheriff’s Office — money that by law is supposed to pay for the benefit, education and welfare of people in custody.
But there’s no easy way to tell how much revenue the Incarcerated Persons’ Welfare Fund raises each year or where the proceeds are directed. And the finances of the jail-based shopping outlet have not been formally audited in at least eight years.
The Sheriff’s Office does not generally disclose spending details for the welfare fund, which is the pool of income derived from profits the Sheriff’s Office receives from commissary sales.
Instead, the region’s largest law enforcement agency limits the information in its published reports to broad spending categories — education, operations and support, free indigent goods, entertainment and recreation, equipment and maintenance.
When pressed for details by The San Diego Union-Tribune over several months, the department released financial data showing that the fund had more than $11 million in the bank as of June 30.
The documents also show that millions of dollars from the welfare fund are used to pay sheriff’s employees’ salaries and benefits. Millions more pay for office supplies, equipment, cleaning, food, postage and other services that might normally be considered routine jail operational expenses.
Sheriff’s Cmdr. Michael Rand of the Detention Services Bureau said the commissary profits support critical re-entry services that help people while they are in custody and once they are released.
“The purpose is to benefit the incarcerated population, to provide them with opportunity, education, career planning, training for careers and trying to give them the opportunity inside our custody so they can be successful outside,” Rand said.
The sheriff’s commander said the jobs, services and supplies supported by commissary profits might otherwise not exist without the welfare fund.
“I would liken it to any average elementary school or high school,” Rand said. “You can have classes, but you have to have staff there to teach. You have to have administrators to coordinate those classes. We have to pay for the books. We have to pay for supplies.”
State law calls for public disclosure of Incarcerated Persons’ Welfare Fund finances.
But the sheriff’s annual report to the county Board of Supervisors provides only basic information about agency spending, which totaled $5.7 million during the year ending June 30. The most recent document did not disclose any information about annual revenue or savings.
“There have been no significant changes or deviations from the previous spending patterns,” the sheriff’s letter to county supervisors said.
Just over 75% of the money went to educational programs, the Sheriff’s Office said. Another 11% was spent on providing bus and trolley passes and other goods to indigent people in jail at no cost to them, the department said in a one-page report and pie chart.
The final $700,000 or so paid for supplies, operations, equipment and other services, the sheriff said.
No specific information about programs or spending was provided.
In an email sent to county officials last month, a Bonita resident named Paul Henkin criticized the sheriff for disclosing so little information.
“To call an annotated pie chart an itemized report as called for in Penal Code 4025e is a bit of a stretch,” Henkin wrote. “It would also be nice to know if any of these funds in fact augment county expenses.”
Rand said the department’s report is mirrored by prior submissions, and very few people have asked for more details.
“That’s something we can look at when we provide it next year,” he said.
‘Benefit and welfare’
Formerly called inmate welfare funds, the pools of money aimed at supporting and benefiting people behind bars were first introduced in California in the late 1940s, when then-Gov. Earl Warren allowed sheriffs to sell tobacco, candy and other personal items to prisoners.
According to state law, “money in the fund shall be used solely for the benefit and welfare of” people in prison or jails.
But the legislation also provides prison officials and county sheriffs leeway to use portions of the fund to pay certain salaries and expenses, including for employees who run educational programs or other services.
Over the years, San Diego County has used its welfare funds to maintain vehicles, buy fuel and pay for employees’ cellphones and out-of-county travel.
The store offers a variety of snacks and personal items, such as cough drops, washcloths and skin cream. It also sells gift packs, reading glasses, stationery and multivitamins.
Inmates’ family and friends can place orders online, and people in custody can use Scantron forms to order whatever they want, relying on money deposited into their commissary accounts by friends and family — or any cash they had in their pockets at the time they were booked. Orders are generally delivered within the next day or two.
“The cost of commissary items is comparable to convenience-store pricing,” the sheriff’s website says.
Nick Shepack is the Nevada state director for the Fines and Fees Justice Center, a national nonprofit that works to reform what it sees as unfair charges and penalties across the criminal justice system.
Shepack said prison and jail officials have grown accustomed to supplementing their budgets through welfare funds.
“The legal language allows for what we are seeing in San Diego to be very common,” he said. “They’ll use it to pay visitation staff or anyone working in the commissary. It’s usually caused by pressure from governors and lawmakers to stop budget increases or save money from the general fund.”
The San Diego Sheriff’s Office is not alone in relying on welfare funds to pay other expenses.
A study published earlier this year by the Prison Policy Initiative, a research and advocacy nonprofit based in Massachusetts, found that corrections officials all over the country have misused money meant to benefit people in custody.
“In virtually every state, incarcerated people and their families subsidize the operation of prisons and jails when they pay for phone calls and commissary items, or make deposits into their loved ones’ accounts,” said the report.
The authors of “Shadow Budgets: How mass incarceration steals from the poor to give to the prison” said they found cases where welfare funds were used to buy gift cards for jail staff, gun range memberships for guards and even bullets, guns and vests for officers and deputies.
“Our analysis of prison systems across the U.S. reveals that they are used more like slush funds that, in many cases, make society’s most vulnerable people pay for prison operations, staff salaries, benefits and more,” the study said.
Growing fund balance
In 2021, roughly one year into the COVID-19 pandemic that prevented in-person visits, San Diego County agreed to make jail telephone calls free.
The change, which has been part of a growing trend nationally, took a major bite out of welfare fund revenue. The pool’s income shrank from $6 million in the 2019-20 fiscal year to $4.9 million the following year and $3.1 million in 2021-22.
As a result, spending from the fund fell from more than $6 million in 2019-20 to $2.4 million in 2021-22. The spending subsequently climbed to $5.7 million in the budget year ending June 30.
The money kept on deposit has not declined accordingly, however.
In 2019-20, the Sheriff’s Office recorded a year-end fund balance of $8.7 million. It was $11.1 million for the 2023-24 fiscal year, a 27% increase over the past five years, department records show.
“The Sheriff’s Office is proactive in our attempt to project future fund balances and provide fiscal stability,” office spokesperson Kimberly King said in an email.
She said the agency “maintains more than adequate reserves” and follows the county’s overall operational approach to planning, including a five-year financial forecast.
The Incarcerated Persons’ Welfare Fund is governed by a committee that meets inside the Las Colinas women’s jail in Santee every two months to make decisions about spending and programming.
Fifteen of the 16 members are sheriff’s employees and the panel has one citizen adviser. The group’s votes are advisory, meaning any official spending or program initiatives are made by the sheriff and her command staff.
“We want to get a formerly incarcerated person on the committee, and we are currently interviewing people at this time,” said Rand, the sheriff’s commander. “From our standpoint, and the sheriff’s standpoint, we want to be completely transparent.”
The San Diego County grand jury investigated the sheriff’s welfare fund in a report last year after receiving a complaint that the money was being hoarded or misspent and that the sheriff was not complying with transparency rules.
Jurors noted some improvements in how the Sheriff’s Office has been managing the welfare fund in recent years but issued a spate of recommendations to the sheriff and to the Board of Supervisors.
Among other things, the grand jury said the sheriff should rewrite its bylaws to better define what constitutes appropriate spending. It also said the agency should institute time studies to record how many hours workers spend on welfare-fund issues compared to overall work, and noted the sheriff has no evidence or published evaluation of the effectiveness of the re-entry programs.
Sheriff Kelly A. Martinez rejected all three suggestions.
“The Sheriff’s Department disagrees wholly with the finding,” the formal response repeatedly said.
While the sheriff agreed with some other findings, San Diego County officials were less receptive to the grand jury’s recommendations.
Jurors had also said the county should set up an advisory panel to review welfare fund operations, authorize an independent study of welfare fund benefits, require audits of the program at least once every three years and lobby state officials to tighten rules over welfare funds.
In each response, the county said: “The recommendation requires further analysis.”
Spokespersons for San Diego County did not respond to requests for updates on the grand jury recommendations or any analyses that may be underway.
Social justice advocate Yusef Miller said the sheriff needs to do a better job accounting for the welfare fund and the coursework it pays for. More resources should be directed to post-release efforts rather than employee salaries and benefits, he said.
“There is no trust in Sheriff’s Department spending, especially in regards to the Incarcerated Persons’ Welfare Fund,” said Miller, who co-founded the North County Equity and Justice Coalition and Saving Lives in Custody Coalition.
“We have noted for years that facilities seem to take precedence over effective rehabilitative programming,” he said.
Jerry Wu contributed to this report.
