Faced with multiple lawsuits, a brutal state audit and a growing number of deaths inside San Diego County jails, Sheriff Kelly Martinez has introduced an ambitious — and costly — 10-year plan to upgrade the region’s aging detention centers.
The Sheriff’s Department introduced what it calls a strategic framework for renovating and replacing the county’s seven-facility jail system.
The effort will not come cheap.
Martinez said she expects the planning, design and construction of county jails will cost almost $500 million over the next decade.
The majority of that would be spent to overhaul or replace the Vista Detention Facility, the huge North County center that dates back to 1970. The department expects to spend some $316 million over the next decade renovating or replacing the complex.
The sheriff last week sought and received approval from the Board of Supervisors to proceed with the modernization plan. Supervisors approved $1.5 million in spending on the next phase of planning for the Vista project.
“The renovation option will be thoroughly explored to include the necessary upgrades to the central plant at the North County Regional Center,” Martinez told supervisors. “A complete replacement option involving demolition of the existing facility and constructing a newly designed facility to modern standards will also be studied.”
A 12-page summary of the framework released last week also singles out major development projects at the South Bay Detention Facility in Otay Mesa and the Central Jail in downtown San Diego.
Those two projects would take up to seven years to complete and some $85 million to complete. Upgrades at the department’s other four lockups would take less time and collectively cost tens of millions of dollars to complete.
Part of the spending approved last week would help identify possible funding sources for the $488 million investment. The department plans to report back to supervisors on ways to pay for the renovations by the end of June.
The executive summary is the latest public effort by the sheriff, sworn in early this year after winning election last November, to show she is responsive to criticisms of her department’s jails by supervisors, the state auditor, the grand jury, criminal justice reform advocates and the families of people who have died in custody.
State auditors last year said conditions inside San Diego County jails were so dangerous that new legislation was needed to impose changes in the Sheriff’s Department operations.
Some such legislation has since become law. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two bills last month aimed at improving oversight of county jails across California and boosting transparency inside sheriff’s departments after they review in-custody deaths.
Senate Bill 519, authored by San Diego Sen. Toni Atkins, created the position of a state director to examine in-custody deaths and called on sheriffs to release internal investigative records related to jail deaths.
Assembly Bill 268, introduced by Assemblymember Akilah Weber of La Mesa, added a mental-health and medical professional to the Board of State and Community Corrections, the agency that monitors county jails.
“This bill takes a common sense approach to update the standards of the Board of State and Community Corrections to ensure the health and safety of persons in custody,” Weber said last month.
Martinez said the state audit released last year, the same day longtime Sheriff Bill Gore retired, was a wakeup call for the department.
“Since the release of the audit report, the Sheriff’s Department has been making intentional efforts to improve service delivery to those in custodial care,” she told supervisors last week. “This has been achieved through focused and extraordinary changes to existing systems and processes.”
The sheriff has her work cut out for her nonetheless.
Thirty-two men and women have died in San Diego County jails since the state audits findings were released Feb. 3, 2022, including one who died at a local hospital hours after being granted a compassionate release.
Lawsuits and reforms
The 10-year modernization plan also is designed to improve the health care provided in county jails, which often lack adequate facilities to treat the challenging population.
Apart from those who have died in sheriff’s custody, the department has been repeatedly accused of lapses in medical and mental health care that caused serious harm to incarcerated people.
One year into the COVID-19 pandemic, for example, public-interest lawyers representing men and women in San Diego County jails sued the sheriff for failing to protect them from the virus.
Congregate-living environments like jails, hospitals and nursing homes were especially vulnerable, and federal guidelines advised those institutions to take steps that San Diego County initially resisted, complaints alleged.
The sheriff’s approach to testing and vaccinating people caused outbreaks that sickened both people in custody and the guards and healthcare workers who treat them, according to the March 2021 lawsuit.
This past June, the department announced a settlement that called for sheriff’s officials to make more prompt determinations of whether people in custody are at a heightened risk of illness or death due to COVID-19.
The sheriff also agreed to place high-risk people in more protective housing, to expand access to testing, to distribute masks consistent with federal health standards and to ensure regular access to soaps and cleaning supplies.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys called the agreement a win for people behind bars.
“However, a lawsuit should not have been necessary to force Sheriffs Bill Gore, Anthony Ray and Kelly Martinez to uphold their duty to ensure the safety of people who are incarcerated,” ACLU staff attorney Jonathan Markovitz said then.
Sheriff’s officials said the department already was working to prevent the virus from spreading inside jails.
“Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the Sheriff’s Department took proactive steps to ensure our seven detention facilities followed strict guidelines to minimize the spread of COVID-19,” the department said in a June statement.
San Diego County also is being sued for how the sheriff houses disabled people in custody — something else the modernization effort is aimed at addressing.
The case was filed by 14 currently or previously incarcerated persons who suffer various disabilities.
Among other things, the complaint accused the jail of placing people with mobility issues in upper bunks, meaning they were hard-pressed to sleep comfortably or even access the bed. The county also was accused of failing to provide sign-language interpreters and not complying with rules governing special-needs detainees.
“Plaintiffs and incarcerated people with disabilities have suffered loss of dignity and physical injuries as a result of defendants’ policies and practices, and they are at ongoing risk of future harm,” the plaintiffs’ legal team wrote.
While that case is moving forward, the sheriff agreed this summer to make some changes to accommodate disabled people in her custody.
Just last month, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board was investigating a complaint that people in jail were being sickened from having to clean up human waste overflowing from regularly clogged toilets.
“They are saying the guards force them to clean up the waste and they have no protective equipment, including gloves,” the complaint filed by activist Laila Aziz stated.
The planned upgrades include building more housing units to properly serve disabled people and upgrading plumbing systems and other infrastructure.
Years in the planning
The Sheriff’s Department has been working to upgrade its healthcare and jail infrastructure since at least 2016, when it retained the nonprofit National Commission on Correctional Health Care to examine its practices and facilities.
The idea was to secure accreditation from the organization one sheriff’s commander called “the gold standard” in jail operations.
But the commission study found that dozens of recommendations would need to be implemented before the San Diego County jail system could be accredited. Besides calling for changes in jail practices, the report said the facilities would need major and costly upgrades.
The 10-year framework released by the sheriff last week is the first comprehensive road map for renovating or replacing department facilities that has been prepared for public disclosure and debate.
In addition to the Vista Detention Facility investment, the strategy notes the recent opening of one wing of the Rock Mountain Detention Facility — an upgrade that ran $10 million over budget and was delayed by almost three years.
The strategy now calls for spending over $1 million in new funding over two years to increase the number of beds at that jail to 1,400.
The Rock Mountain upgrades will allow the department to move detainees from the nearby George Bailey Detention Facility while that jail undergoes renovations. The George Bailey effort is planned to take three years and some $52 million to design and build, the framework said.
At the East Mesa Reentry Facility, a lower-security jail just across a parking lot from George Bailey and Rock Mountain, the sheriff plans a five-year, $27 million renovation that would extend its anticipated useful life.
“The freestanding nature of the campus buildings and dormitories will help to limit the impacts to system capacity,” the framework summary says.
In 2019, the sheriff requested almost $1 million in funding to address a “catastrophic equipment failure” at the East Mesa lockup.
Supervisors quickly approved the spending.
The Las Colinas women’s jail in Santee was completely rebuilt and opened in 2014.
The sheriff’s planned upgrades at that jail, the county’s newest, includes just over $1 million in renovations through the 10-year schedule of all seven facilities.
