Tagged With "Jails"

By Don Thompson, San Francisco Chronicle, December 27, 2019 An inmate in solitary confinement at a California jail was refusing to leave his cell. The jailers' usual response: Send an “extraction team” of corrections officers to burst into the cell and drag him out. But not in Contra Costa County, one of three in the state using a kinder, gentler approach in response to inmate lawsuits, a policy change that experts say could be a national model for reducing the use of isolation cells. So the...

By The Times Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times, March 8, 2020 Imagine a woman named Monica. She trudges up the steps toward the courthouse door but stops short, overcome by a feeling of dread. Each time she’d walked through that door in the past she’d had to leave behind something of value before she could walk out again. Once it was the money for next month’s rent, because she had to pay a traffic fine. And then it was her apartment itself, because she was too many months in arrears. And,...

By Maria Dinzeo, Courthouse News Service, February 3, 2020 For years, the city and county of San Francisco has housed inmates awaiting trial in tiny cells, letting them out for only a few hours a day for exercise and often depriving them of any time outdoors, but conditions are set to improve for some after a federal judge ruled Friday that pretrial detainees incarcerated for more than four years must be given at least one hour a week of access to direct sunlight. The order handed down by...

By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, California Health Care Foundation, April 24, 2020 Many county correctional facilities throughout California are reducing their teeming populations to prevent large-scale COVID-19 outbreaks. The dorm rooms, dining halls, and recreation areas in many of these institutions are breeding grounds for spreading the virus, experts say. People have been complaining for weeks that inmates don’t have hand sanitizer or equipment like masks to protect themselves and that cramped...

By Terry Gross, National Public Radio, April 9, 2020 Chesa Boudin's radical leftist parents were imprisoned when he was a toddler. Now he's working to reduce the inmate population in San Francisco — and worrying about his dad, who remains in prison. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. It's difficult or impossible to practice social distancing in an overcrowded prison, which is dangerous not only for the people who are incarcerated but also for the guards and other prison...

By Nate Gartrell and Annie Sciacca, The Mercury News, April 16, 2020 Arrests that result in jail bookings have dropped to staggeringly low rates throughout Contra Costa, in response to state and local directives aimed at curbing the spread of COVID-19 in the county jail system. Over the past 30 days, the rate of new inmates being booked in Contra Costa jails fell by 84 percent, from a norm of roughly 60 per day to roughly 10 per day, Sheriff David Livingston told the county Board of...

By Magnus Lofstrom and Brandon Martin, Public Policy Institute of California, May 6, 2020 In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, California has sought to reduce county jail populations through a range of actions, including a “zero bail” emergency measure . This means that most misdemeanor and lower-level felonies currently have no bail amount associated with them, and that suspects are more likely to be cited and released instead of booked into jail. This new practice, along with...

By Jason Pohl, The Sacramento Bee, May 27, 2020 California’s long history of altering its criminal justice system — from requiring life in prison for third-strike offenders to reducing the punishment for hundreds of crimes — is having another moment that could dramatically alter how the state locks people up. In a seismic, almost overnight shift, California has jailed 21,700 fewer people — nearly one-third of its daily population — in county lockups since the new coronavirus hit the state.