Sara Rubin here, after visiting the Monterey County Jail for the first time ever. The facility was effectively closed to the press for eight of the nine last years during the previous sheriff’s administration. Sheriff Tina Nieto, who was elected in 2022, ran on a promise of transparency as well as a promise to remediate problems in the jail.
By taking me, Associate Editor Erik Chalhoub and Staff Photographer Daniel Dreifuss inside the building yesterday, her administration demonstrated a commitment to part one of that promise. As to part two, it’s a work in progress.
“This has been a difficult couple years. We’ve gone through our crises,” Nieto told the Board of Supervisors on May 29.
She was speaking at the board’s budget hearing, and asking for $2.7 million beyond what was recommended by county administrators. The question ultimately is how much money it costs to pay for adequate safety in this carceral facility.
Undersheriff Keith Boyd, who joined Capt. Rebecca Smith and Chief Deputy Garrett Sanders in leading us through the jail, is confident that with additional staffing, they can get there.
The backstory is that this facility has a tragic history of preventable deaths among people who are incarcerated here, some due to medical emergency, some due to suicide. That tragic history led to a 2013 class-action lawsuit, Hernandez vs. County of Monterey and Wellpath (the contractor providing medical care in the jail), which the parties settled in 2015. But as we’ve reported in the Weekly, the jail was not complying with its terms of the settlement.
The noncompliance is told in heartbreaking detail in documents produced over years by third-party monitors, and finally released to the public last year. It’s also told in lawsuits filed by surviving family members of deceased inmates against the County, taking the limited steps available to them to seek justice.
It’s hard to imagine how additional funding (which would support 23 total additional positions, 21 of those in the Corrections Bureau) could fix these problems. But a brief tour starts to show how it would help.
The first noticeable thing is the sheer size of the jail. It gets bigger if you are making the rounds to conduct welfare checks—required at a minimum every hour, so they strive for 50 minutes, meaning some deputies are constantly in motion, making the rounds block to block. (Some deputies who wear fitness trackers have logged up to 12 miles a day.) It means they are not available for any tasks beyond welfare checks.
At 12:30pm on a Monday, the intake area is calm. But a woman is in the process of being booked; a Probation officer who arrested her stands by as a jail deputy pats her down. Others who have already been booked are on the phone, trying to sort out bail. One woman tries to sleep on a hard bench in the bright lights—in the intake area, it’s always bright. “This is a very high-risk area,” Boyd says. “We want to move people either out of the jail or into a housing unit.”
The supplemental staffing would take the intake area from four deputies per shift to five, especially helpful due to welfare checks. People in sobering cells require welfare checks every 15 minutes. Those on suicide watch require constant attention from a deputy. This means if there’s an issue, deputies get called away from elsewhere in the jail—there is nobody available to backfill.
Boyd and Nieto are also asking for funds to bolster a compliance division, including two civilian positions (an analyst and office manager) to track what’s been done (or not) toward compliance with the Hernandez settlement.
“We are hopeful the board will approve the expansion of the compliance division,” Boyd says. “We are laser-focused on meeting the terms of the settlement.”
The Board of Supervisors meets at 9am on Thursday (at 168 W. Alisal St., Salinas, or virtually). They’ll be deliberating about a host of potential last-minute adjustments, addressing issues like a vaping prevention campaign for public health, new park rangers and videoconferencing capabilities for the Military and Veterans Affairs Office. I hope that people who work in the jail and who are incarcerated there also get a bigger slice of the finite pie.