Realignment has Santa Clara County officials concerned about security and health care improvements in its jails, reports Correctional News.
Realignment is the state’s response to a federal order for California to cap its prisons to levels where adequate health care could be delivered to its inmates. One component is keeping low-level offenders in county jails instead of sending them to a state prison.
An assessment made last November placed the county’s jail population at just over 4,000 inmates, nearly 700 of which were diverted from state facilities as part of the realignment plan. “Acts of violence against facility staff have increased noticeably since Realignment, up from 10 over a six-month period in 2012 to 17 in the same time frame in 2013,” Correctional News reported. In addition, the report says there is an increase in gang activity, which caused jailers to keep rival gangs separated.
There is an older population entering the jail system, according to the report—increasing the need for medical attention to chronic illnesses.
Adding to the problems in the jails is as more inmates are shifted to its system, the number of high-security inmate rises. According to the report, the number of high-security inmates is 43 percent higher than just over a year ago, including a 30 percent increase in inmates convicted of murder.
Jail staff is also tasked with “managing a sharp increase in aging and mentally ill inmates,” Correctional News shows. “Roughly 25 percent more inmates are requiring daily medication to manage their various conditions.”
In 1997, Abel Esparza, 60, was convicted in Santa Clara County Superior Court under the Three-Strikes law. He was sentence to 25 years to life.
Last November, California voters changed the law so that three-strikers who were convicted of non-serious, non-violent, non-sexual felonies could ask the court for a reduced sentence.
Esparza qualified for a re-sentencing hearing and was brought to Santa Clara County jail to await his court appearance.
Esparza said the jail conditions were “terrible. It resembled CDCR, before Plata and Coleman.”
The Plata v. Brown and Coleman v. Brown are the lawsuits where the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that CDCR’s health care and mental health services are inadequate, thus violating the U.S. Constitution’s Eighth Amendment.
Esparza said, “I could hardly wait to return back to San Quentin, because the jail has highly increased in gang activities.”
Correctional News reports that the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors approved the allocation of $500,000 — made available through a state trust — for an assessment that “will review the jails’ current capabilities and future needs.”
