State overreach on coronavirus jail release makes Stanislaus County less safe
“Fabian Cardoza headed to the shower in the dilapidated Merced County Main Jail. The 20-year-old had spent a month there awaiting trial on a robbery charge. Two cellmates boxed him in. One pinned Cardoza to the floor. The other slipped a braided bedsheet around his neck and tightened it.”
So began a Sacramento Bee and ProPublica account of a June 2018 jailhouse murder, blamed in part on the facility’s outdated design making supervision difficult. Inmate assailants carried the corpse to a cell, where a guard discovered it 24 hours later.
Other killings of inmates by inmates occurred in the same Merced lockup in 2015 and 2017. Authorities knew of its defects, but their $40 million request for state construction money had failed.
Perhaps the Judicial Council of California had in mind that sort of aging detention facility when the council recently ordered low-level inmates freed throughout the entire state, to lower the chances of a catastrophic COVID-19 outbreak. The coronavirus can spread like wildfire in places with contained, densely packed populations.
It’s too bad that the council decided to fashion a one-size-fits-all precaution for all 58 California counties. Something less than a blanket approach might lead to safer streets here in Stanislaus County.
Stanislaus detention facilities, like jails anywhere, are far from perfect. Inmates have attacked each other and committed suicide here, like any other lockup. But our newer jail generally is considered a model for others around the state.
The county jail on Hackett Road, called the Public Safety Center, underwent a recent $153 million expansion and modernization. Added were an 840-bed new wing, medical and mental health offices, and areas for counseling, jobs training and parenting and anger management classes.
Stanislaus County Sheriff Jeff Dirkse lauds facility
“Our jail is, if not the best, one of the best in the state of California,” Stanislaus Sheriff Jeff Dirkse said in a Monday telephone interview.
New protocol requires screening for illness, like taking the temperature of everyone entering. Four inmates recently showed flu-like symptoms and were isolated, and tests came back negative for COVID-19.
But the Judicial Council took no account of quality differences from county to county when it established an April 6 bail schedule reducing to $0 the amount that some inmates must post to go free pending trial.
Inmates facing most misdemeanor charges, except for domestic violence and drunken driving, and some felony offenses no longer have to come up with any bail at all. The result: about 90 inmates were released from Stanislaus custody Monday.
That’s cause for concern, Dirkse, Modesto Police Chief Galen Carroll and Stanislaus District Attorney Birgit Fladager told The Bee’s Erin Tracy for her Sunday write-up. Preliminarily, it was thought that as many as 350 inmates might be freed early — more than a quarter of Sunday’s 1,243 total jail population.
Laura Arnold, Stanislaus’ public defender, said the statewide order “correctly balances the public safety risk of release” with the rights of pretrial inmates, who are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Those freed are better able to help their families, she noted in Tracy’s story, although Arnold expressed some worry about people losing ready access to government services, like housing.
Arnold is right when she says incarceration is not the answer to society’s many ills. But this is not a prisoners’ rights issue. It’s about keeping people safe — for people in jail, safe from the coronavirus, and for the rest of us, from people who normally would be in jail.
The Judicial Council’s goal is sound; a COVID-19 outbreak among closely quartered inmates would be horrible. But the council’s inflexible solution to this potential problem is misguided because it allows no discretion to local experts — in this case, sheriffs. Ours knows what he’s doing and should have authority to do it.
This story was originally published April 13, 2020 at 6:45 PM.