The Riders Scandal rattled the city of Oakland in 2001, leading to a historic prosecution, a massive civil-rights lawsuit, and decades of federal oversight. As investigative reporters Ali Winston and Darwin BondGraham detail in The Riders Come out at Night, their exhaustive new history of the Oakland Police Department, the fate of the men on trial essentially hinged on a central question: were these officers bad apples, or were their actions evidence of a far deeper rot?

The Alameda County DA’s prosecution strategy relied on painting the “Riders,” as the gang came to be known, as rogue cops within an otherwise functional system. It’s not hard to imagine why the DA might be invested in excising the Riders from the rest of the OPD. I noticed the same dynamic during the trial of Derek Chauvin: other cops testified over and over that his actions were against procedure. By proving the aberrance of the few, the state can demonstrate guilt—and preserve the good name of the many.

Meanwhile, in arguing that the Riders’ actions were within procedure, the defense advanced a far more damning indictment of the OPD, inadvertently making an argument more common among abolitionist critics of American policing. The Riders’ lawyer, Winston and BondGraham write, called the Oakland police chief to the stand, then used his testimony to “show the jury a picture of a city where cops had been told to be aggressive, put their hands on suspects, hit the corners, and attack the drug trade head-on. Their actions, no matter how egregious, were all in the name of public safety and hitting the mayor’s magic 20 percent crime drop.” The Riders, in other words, “weren’t rogue cops; they were following orders.” The fact that the case would end in two separate mistrials, with one officer ultimately acquitted, suggests that the bad apple theory failed to sufficiently compel jurors. And though Winston and BondGraham argue repeatedly that the Riders were far from rogue cops, the real question they’re interested in exploring is slightly different.

What are the preconditions that allow a group like the Riders to flourish, the journalists ask, and what can be done to preclude those conditions? Or, in plainer language: why are police the way they are—and is it possible for them to change?

Winston and BondGraham answer the first half of this question clearly, devoting a considerable amount of Riders to the OPD’s 19^th-century origins as a violent and graft-prone institution that exploited and suppressed minority groups. 

“During the first century of the department’s existence, custom and practice condoned the quick use of the nightstick and revolver to control restive populations: labor unions, the Chinese, and white ethnic immigrants who upset the city’s image of itself as a pious, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon settlement,” they write. Dozens of Oakland police officers were members of the KKK; at one point, Winston and BondGraham refer to the Klan as night riders, wording that draws a direct line between the Riders and these grim forebears, especially given the supposed origin of the nickname (a Black man who’d been stopped for a traffic violation allegedly thanked the officer for being respectful, and added, “This isn’t at all what it’s like at night. At night, the Riders come out.”)

When African Americans started arriving in Oakland during the Great Migration, the combative, us-vs.-them mentality the OPD had cultivated against immigrants and radicals was neatly transposed onto this new population, with a heaping dose of anti-Black racial hatred thrown in to boot. In 1950, during one of the city’s first panels on police brutality, a local civil rights attorney testified that “the Negro citizens of Oakland live in daily and nightly terror of the Oakland Police Department.” The chief of police, meanwhile, dismissed this criticism as a Communist plot. 

Whether police can change, though, is a trickier question—and a divisive one, especially on the left. The reporters lean into this tension. To say that reform is impossible, they argue, discredits the painstaking work of activists, lawyers, journalists, and ordinary people to expose the department’s abuses and bring it to heel. For evidence of this truth, look no further than Riders itself, which would not have been possible without both authors’ years of dedicated reporting on the OPD, statewide legislative reforms that required law enforcement to turn over more internal records, and the hard work of an attorney who sued on behalf of the two journalists, forcing OPD to comply with these new laws. To contend that nothing can be done would be to imply that there is no reason to fight.

But there are limits, and Winston and BondGraham, who spent years covering the OPD as local investigative journalists, explore them in excruciating detail. Take the Riders whistleblower Keith Batt, a rookie whose testimony allowed the case to go to trial and was key in establishing the federal consent decree that’s covered the department since. On its face, the story pits the Riders’ “bad cops” against Batt, a “good cop” who did the right thing under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. But without negating anyone’s agency or moral culpability, Winston and BondGraham show how it’s ultimately less about the individual will of the officers than what the system they work within condones—and encourages. The department rewards and promotes aggressive, confrontation-prone cops, and constrains ethical ones: taking them off assignments, making their work lives hell, and often driving them to quit. Two Black officers who are presented as critics of the OPD’s practices eventually leave; one ends up writing a sociology dissertation about the force’s endemic racism. 

For every Batt, there are dozens of officers depicted in this book who look the other way, and face few consequences for it. The whistleblower ultimately served just 17 days in the OPD. He was harassed relentlessly, essentially forced to resign, and found himself threatened by other cops when they crossed paths afterward—even as one of the Riders successfully sued the city for wrongful termination, walking away with $1.5 million in damages. Someone illegally pulled Batt’s DMV records, accessing his home address and other personal information. And with the scariest of the Riders remaining a fugitive from justice today, Batt is probably still looking over his shoulder more than two decades later.

Riders begins with the book’s eponymous scandal, then zooms out to capture the historical and political context that led up to it, the fight to prosecute the officers at its center, and two prominent local civil rights lawyers’ simultaneous efforts to hold the department accountable. The result: a federal consent decree—a court-enforced reform agreement—from which the department has still not emerged, two decades later.

Winston and BondGraham make the stakes clear. The consent decree is the external accountability tool for reforming American police departments, and Oakland has been under one longer than anyone—even LA, where the Rampart scandal, which came on the heels of the Rodney King beating, occasioned one in 2000. “More has been done to try to reform the Oakland Police Department than any other police force in the United States,” they write.

From the beginning, though, the authors sow doubt as to whether the OPD will ever be able to fully comply with the terms of the decree, a comprehensive settlement agreement that required the OPD to overhaul its training and internal investigations, implement an ‘early warning system’ to root out problem officers, and make sure all officers were supervised in an attempt to avoid the lack of oversight that led to the Riders’ abuses. 

Many in the department are openly hostile toward its imposition. (“You’ve got to stop using that word reform,” a captain nicknamed ‘Maniac’ tells one of the external monitors, suggesting that his men will bristle at even the mention of change.) There is a culture of silence and internal loyalty around officer misconduct that extends even to the most egregious cases. To call OPD’s Internal Affairs team merely feckless feels charitable; the division often gives the impression of actively stonewalling investigations. Punishments, when they are occasionally meted out, are downgraded, and then downgraded again; it’s not uncommon for officers to resign rather than accept their slap on the wrist. The department’s union, the Oakland Police Officers Association, is willing to spend whatever it takes to defend its men, which often results in cops who brutalize and kill civilians getting their jobs back through arbitration.

And Winston and BondGraham also show how opportunities for change have been thwarted by historical vicissitudes: the war on drugs; state and municipal budget crises; the subprime mortgage crisis, which disproportionately targeted Black and Latinx homeowners; the leadership of politicians like Jerry Brown, whose lefty-radio vibes quickly morphed into law-and-order rhetoric in order to win his mayoral race in the late ‘90s. The book doubles as a rich political history of Oakland, the birthplace of the Black Panthers and a city that has been repeatedly devastated by austerity and racist policies. 

“So long as Oakland and the rest of America is riven by extreme racial and class inequalities and the power of the federal government is not brought to repair the economies of destitute cities and rural areas, and deal with the intergenerational trauma that leads to despair and hopelessness,” they write, “then it’s very likely the police will continue serving more or less the same function they have for well over a half century: containing and repressing the symptoms of broader social problems through violence.”

The second half of the book explores OPD’s glacial progress post-consent decree, which is continually marred by the revelation of scandal after scandal. At one point, Winston and BondGraham describe this advancement as “two steps forward, and one step back.” Often, reading Riders, it felt more like the other way around.

There’s a moment around 2014 where things are starting to look up: For the first time in decades, the OPD had a chief interested in reform and willing to stand up to the police association. The department was finally making good progress on its settlement agreement tasks. “In just a year, the Oakland PD went from utter failure to a national leader in policing reforms,” the journalists write.

Reading this feels sort of like watching the beginning of a horror movie: you suspect that something awful is coming, even as the characters remain unaware. And the next scandal to be revealed is one of the most stomach-churning in the book: the Celeste Guap case. Guap was the pseudonym of a young woman named Jasmine Abuslin who was groomed, abused, and pimped out, both before and after her 18^th birthday, by multiple OPD officers as well as cops from a laundry list of other departments in the region.  

Cases like Abuslin’s stand out for their shock value. The abuse was discovered when a cop who groomed and statutorily raped the girl shot himself in the head and left a damning suicide note. That decision unleashed a chain of events that eventually lead investigators to realize that the cop had most likely killed his wife several years earlier, staged it as a suicide, and had the whole thing covered up by the department. This was after Abuslin revealed the abuse directly to an OPD sergeant, who responded to her by writing “tell me you were an adult.” The internal investigation went nowhere. 

But the individual instances of cruelty, incompetence, misconduct, and malfeasance detailed in Riders can start to blur together. In a way this is the point. The book does center the Riders scandal, but it doesn’t argue for its exceptionalism; those officers’ wrongdoing is presented alongside many, many more examples big and small, lurid and mundane.

One in particular struck me. It could have happened in any police department in the country. It’s the case of Spencer Lucas, a young Black man who was stopped by OPD officers while driving to a friend’s house in 2005. Lucas was just 30 days away from completing a three-year parole term when he was pulled over. He was essentially homeless, but otherwise doing well. The cops seemed to want to mess with him. When they found out he was on parole, they got their chance. They strip-searched him in broad daylight, finding nothing. Even after calling his parole officer and finding out he’d been complying with all his terms, they forced him all over the city in handcuffs, trying to find something that would constitute a violation of his parole. After hours of this, they showed up at the home of his estranged wife, searched it, and found a BB gun.

In this brief anecdote, we see this institution, even under federal decree to do better, return to familiar habits: doing nothing to keep people safe, but instead intruding greedily into their private lives, searching for ways to snatch them back within its clutches, and fostering only rage and humiliation and despair in those it targets. As a result of that encounter, Lucas ended up going back to prison for almost a year.

The post Oakland’s “Riders” Scandal and the Fraught Road to Police Reform appeared first on Bolts.

Civil rights attorney Pamela Price has won the DA race in Alameda County, home to Oakland, Berkeley, and about twice as many residents as San Francisco. Local media called her race over the weekend after an updated ballot count showed her with a 53 to 47 percent lead over Terry Wiley, a longtime prosecutor in the office who was outgoing DA Nancy O’Malley’s chosen successor. 

Price has spent the bulk of her career in civil rights law, spearheading litigation against California’s prison system. She has even fought the office she is about to lead, as an advocate for battered women. She told Bolts that she ran because of “an unacceptable, intolerable level of racial injustice that just called me to action.”  

Price, who will be Alameda County’s first Black DA, deployed an ambitious platform that includes reducing the number of people locked up in the county’s deadly Santa Rita Jail, no longer charging minors as adults, and ending the practice of using people’s prior convictions, or “strikes,” to ramp up their sentences. Running in the context of Oakland’s high homicide rate, she also says she would champion community strategies of gun violence reduction as a more effective response than aggressive prosecutions.

“I think voters were offered very distinct visions of what will help prevent crime from happening in the first place, and when harm does happen, what are the appropriate interventions,” said Yoel Haile, who leads the ACLU of Northern California’s criminal justice program. “What this election shows is that people in Alameda County are tired of that tried-and-failed mass incarceration approach of the incumbent, and of the incumbent’s endorsed candidate.” 

Price is one of several prosecutor candidates who won on such a message this month, including in Minneapolis, Des Moines, and San Marcos, Texas—results that will give reform DAs new figureheads going forward. And she will join others, like Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, a former civil rights attorney who endorsed her campaign, in coming to the role as an outsider.

After negative experiences with the criminal legal system as a child, when she was arrested for organizing student demonstrations, a college encounter with the attorneys who defended the surviving prisoners of the Attica uprising was the thing that first inspired her to eventually become a lawyer. Later on, as a survivor of domestic violence who called the police for help, she was arrested and prosecuted by the Alameda County DA. Price’s experiences of the way the system criminalizes survivors of intimate partner violence led her to make the case that criminal justice reform can better combat gender-based violence than approaches focused on maximizing criminal punishment, Bolts and The Nation reported last month. 

“As someone who has been a survivor of domestic violence and has been an advocate for women all along the whole spectrum, from sexual assault, to sexual harassment to child molestation, all of that, I understand that there are ways that this system has to respond to victims,” she said. “I have to be able to use the tools and the resources that we have in the system to actually serve the people of the county without criminalizing folks.”

Too often, Price said, “Victims are used as tools. We don’t have the orientation or the idea that we are here to help them resolve a situation or to improve their situation.” She has emphasized the utility of restorative justice in resolving interpersonal conflict and said she will not compel victims to testify or prosecute women who act in self-defense against their abusers, both common practice for DAs. 

For an incoming prosecutor, Price is atypically open about the tensions inherent in how she sees the role. “The challenge for me is that I’m saying I want to reduce and eliminate mass incarceration, but I’m going to be working in an office [where] that’s the whole purpose,” she said.

Some progressive or abolitionist critics have faulted reform prosecutors for expanding the scope of these offices rather than shrinking their power. Price acknowledged that she is wary of the way DA offices justify expanding their budgets. “People profit from our pain, and there are government institutions who don’t want to solve the problem because then they lose their funding,” she said. “So I’m trying to make sure we are not going to be profiting and creating something perpetuating the system. Our goal is to go in the opposite direction.”

For local organizations that work on racial justice initiatives and criminal legal reform, this is a moment of urgency as much as it is of possibility: and they are relishing the chance to influence policy at the DA’s office. Sandy Valenciano, Campaign and Organizing Director at the Urban Peace Movement, anticipated a new reality “where our policy recommendations are actually being considered and implemented, and we are looked to, not just as a group to check off your box that you met with them.” 

The Urban Peace Movement is the leader of the DA Accountability Table, a coalition of local criminal legal reform organizations. Valenciano told Bolts that the coalition is planning to present Price with a 100-day agenda. They stress decarceral demands like reducing the number of people sentenced to prison or jail by 25 percent and expanding diversion. This is of acute concern in the county given the current state of Alameda’s Santa Rita Jail, which has seen dozens of deaths in recent years and recently settled a federal class action lawsuit concerning deeply inadequate mental health care provision. “It’s really concerning that incarceration has been the solution to address mental health within our county,” Valenciano said.

In the June primary, Alameda voters ousted their longtime sheriff Gregory Ahern, who oversaw the jail, replacing him with challenger Yesenia Sanchez, the department’s division commander. Sanchez was in charge of Santa Rita in recent years, leaving many advocates leery of her commitment to real change, though she also strongly criticized Ahern’s record during the campaign.

“This tells us that there is real energy in Alameda County for a new direction,” Valenciano said of Sanchez and Price’s back-to-back wins. 

Price got far more support this year than in 2018, when she lost the DA race in the primary by fifteen percentage points against O’Malley, the incumbent. O’Malley, who broadly opposed criminal justice reforms proposed by California progressives during her tenure, went on to serve as the president of the state’s DA association.

Price has already endorsed a number of the coalition’s proposed methods of reducing incarceration rates, including ending the use of sentencing enhancements and taking full advantage of recent resentencing laws passed by the state that allow DAs to petition courts to shorten the sentences of people who have spent decades in prison. 

Under Price, Alameda will be one of the biggest DA offices in the country led by a reformer—putting her under the same bright spotlight that has greeted some of her peers.

Haile stressed that a new prosecutor would need to be prepared for other officials or staff prosecutors in their county to fight or “sabotage” their proposed reforms, and he anticipated that Price would encounter some of the same challenges that other reform DAs have faced in California. Los Angeles’s George Gascón has faced major resistance over his changes within his office; Contra Costa’s Diana Becton survived a competitive re-election race in June after facing attacks heavy by police groups; and San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin was recalled by voters in June after a police work stoppage and after critics of his reforms blamed him for crime in the city. 

“This is a massive, massive job that has very many stakeholders and you’re shepherding multiple moving pieces,” Haile said.

Haile hopes that Price’s unconventional background will allow her to shake things up.  “She brings an outsider’s perspective, which is very much needed when you’re trying to reform an office that has entrenched practices of racism, and doing things the old way and not being willing to change,” he said. 

Price told Bolts that the key to a successful tenure would be remaining in close touch with the voters who elected her. “I’ve said to people consistently, don’t elect me and take me to the front door of the courthouse and say, ‘Okay, Pamela, you got it, go on in there, girl, do your thing,’” she said. “I can’t do like that. I’ve got to have input from this community.” 

The post With Oakland DA Win, Reformers Rebuild Strength in the Bay Area appeared first on Bolts.

Today, Pamela Price is an accomplished civil rights attorney, but her earliest interactions with the law were unfailingly negative. Devastated and enraged by the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., she organized student demonstrations as a teenager—and was tossed in jail for it. After running away from home, she bounced between the foster-care and youth justice systems. “My juvenile experience led me to think, ‘Oh, these lawyers, this is all bad,’” she recalled. “I didn’t want to be part of a legal system, or even a political system. It took years for me to actually get back into being active.”

Price came of age during the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s, when women’s rights activists fought to make the law reflect the equality between the sexes, sought justice for abused women—and ultimately, turned to the criminal legal system to fight gendered oppression, with sometimes disastrous consequences for poor and minority communities. In many ways, she embodies that paradox: the capacity of the law to advance gender justice and its enormous potential for damage. She became the public face of Title IX in college, and would go on to argue groundbreaking sexual harassment and racial discrimination cases in civil court in the ’90s and 2000s. In the 1970s, she advocated for self-defense rights for battered women, and was prosecuted for trying to protect herself and her child from her abuser.  

Now, Price is vying to become the next district attorney of Alameda County—a fraught proposition in its own right. 

Prosecutors have played an instrumental role in using the specter of violence against women to advance a carceral agenda. Take the current Alameda DA, Nancy O’Malley, who established a reputation as a tough sex crimes prosecutor; served as president of the California District Attorneys Association, which frequently lobbies for tough-on-crime policies; and has instituted domestic-violence and sex-trafficking initiatives that advocates warn only sweep more women and girls into the criminal legal system. 

Meanwhile, some critics believe that gender justice remains a blind spot for the progressive prosecutor movement. Getting tough on men who hurt women has long been a bipartisan crowd-pleaser: Conservatives love punishment, while liberals hate the idea of being accused of condoning sexual violence. Including gender-based crimes in any reform platform is a political risk. 

“You have a core progressive idea that says mass incarceration is problematic, we need to do something to counter it,” said Leigh Goodmark, a professor of law at the University of Maryland. “And you also have a core belief that gender-based violence is deeply wrong, and we have to do something as a society to combat that. And progressive prosecutors often see those two things as being in tension.” 

Price, who unsuccessfully challenged O’Malley in 2018, is now running to fill the seat left open by O’Malley’s retirement, representing Oakland, Berkeley, and the rest of the East Bay. Price will face deputy DA Terry Wiley, who is endorsed by O’Malley. In Price’s view, advancing gender equality and dismantling mass incarceration aren’t opposing goals—they need to be pursued together. If women’s liberation is contingent on racial justice, and racial justice necessarily requires women’s liberation, then you can’t fight for one without fighting for the other. 

But to do so will require an approach that transcends the schisms of past liberation movements—and diverges in nearly every respect from the traditional role of the DA. “I’m very much aware that I cannot be complicit in allowing the system to be manipulated based on white supremacy or any kind of gender politics that is used to further criminalize Black and brown people,” Price told me. “The challenge for me is that I’m saying I want to reduce and eliminate mass incarceration, but I’m going to be working in an office [where] that’s the whole purpose.”

Price arrived at Yale in 1974, an emancipated minor on full scholarship. During her junior year, she studied abroad in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. “For the first time in my life, it was full in my face that you’re being treated differently not because you’re Black—because everybody’s Black, right?” she said, laughing. “You’re being treated differently because you’re a woman.”

Price came home changed. “I still understood that my people were oppressed in this country,” she said. “But I was a feminist on top of that.”

In 1977, after being propositioned by an instructor who dangled the promise of a better grade, Price joined a lawsuit brought by several female students against male professors who’d raped or harassed them. The radical feminist theorist Catharine MacKinnon wrote the case’s legal argument, recasting Title IX, then seen as a purely sports-related statute, as a broader tool for gender equality.

“We were in uncharted territory,” Price recalled. “We knew that if we could get Title IX enforced at Yale, it would be enforced everywhere.” In a way, it was her first political campaign. “We held rallies, we did press releases, we raised money,” she said. “And when the case went to trial, we packed the courtroom.”

Of the five plaintiffs, Price was the only Black woman. Soon, after the court determined the others lacked standing, she found herself the only remaining plaintiff. Alexander v. Yale would lose in court, but the women’s efforts won them what they wanted: Yale instituted a grievance policy. Then, so did other universities. “The benefit for me from Alexander,” she reflected, “was knowing that the law is not always where it needs to be—and that as a lawyer, and certainly, as a legislator, as a leader, you have the opportunity to make the law be what it needs to be for everyday people.”

Price went on to Berkeley Law, where she became interested in the emerging legal theory of self-defense for survivors of domestic violence, then more commonly called battered women. She got involved in the case of a woman charged with murder after she killed her abusive husband. Price walked away from the experience disgusted by both the prosecutor’s zeal to punish her and her lawyer’s coziness with the rest of the system. Realizing that Alameda County prosecutors were going after women who defended themselves in other cases too, Price helped form the Bay Area Defense Committee for Battered Women.

Angela Davis and the pioneering lesbian rights activist Del Martin sat on the board for the committee, which took complaints, showed up at court hearings to advocate for women, and educated their defense lawyers on the relevant legal theory. The solidarity they offered was a balm, but it didn’t change outcomes. “The system just grinds people up,” Price said.

During the 1970s and ’80s, battered women’s advocacy groups sprung up around the country. At first, the solutions that feminists advanced were economic ones, like jobs and welfare programs, according to Aya Gruber, the author of The Feminist War on Crime and a professor of law at the University of Colorado. Domestic violence was viewed as a function of disenfranchisement and white supremacy. But as activists sought broader recognition of the movement, they emphasized that abuse happened across racial and class lines, and homed in on a narrower avatar for the issue: What Gruber calls “the white woman behind enormous sunglasses at the club.” Welfare wasn’t a suitable solution for such a victim. 

“The angle for these women is separation and policing, and then they can go divorce their rich husbands, they have this arrest in their back pocket, and they can get child support,” Gruber said. 

In 1984, as Goodmark details in her book Decriminalizing Domestic Violence, three things happened that would change the course of the movement: The federal government officially took the position that intimate partner violence required the criminal legal system; a woman whose husband had severely injured her successfully sued her town on the grounds that police hadn’t acted sooner; and a pair of researchers published the ominously titled study “Minneapolis Domestic Violence Experiment,” which suggested arrests were an effective intervention into spousal abuse. The authors cautioned that their findings, which only compared arrest to other forms of police response, were too preliminary to be acted on, and future studies would undermine their conclusions—yet police across the country adopted mandatory arrest policies for intimate partner violence calls. 

Tellingly, though American feminists never secured the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, they did get the Violence Against Women Act in 1994, which dedicated the majority of its funding to the criminal legal system. By 2013, though total funding for VAWA had nearly doubled, the percentage dedicated to law enforcement had gone up so much that fewer dollars were going to social services than at the time of its passage, nearly two decades earlier.

By sidelining the needs of working-class women of color and turning toward police as the solution, second-wave feminism foreclosed on its liberatory potential for women everywhere. In turn, one of the movement’s most enduring legacies has been not the successful reduction of gender-based violence, but its role in the expansion of the carceral state. All that money and law-enforcement training failed to meaningfully curtail domestic abuse rates. During that time, the country’s ballooning prison and jail population confined and circumscribed the lives of millions, mostly poor men of color. The feminist movement was by no means the sole cause, but the threat of violence against women—implicitly assumed to be white—provided cover and justification for more incarceration.  

The influence of this carceral feminism can be detected in parts of the MeToo movement’s vision of criminal punishment as justice. “Everybody loves to be outraged and say, ‘We’ve got to have change,’ and ‘Time’s up,’ and ‘Now, now, now,’” said Gruber. “Those things actually turn into laws. And we have no idea how those laws will operate and most of the time, if they’re criminal laws, there’s somewhere, someplace where it’s not going very well for a lot of marginalized people.”

Men still represent the great majority of those incarcerated, meaning that women are often seen as indirect victims of the system, subject to the vast social, emotional, financial, and psychological toll of supporting an incarcerated loved one. But Gruber, Goodmark, and organizers who fight for intersectional gender justice stress that these policies also directly hurt women and children.

“When somebody is envisioning a young person who’s been exploited, they have a very clear image,” said Jessica Nowlan, president of Reimagine Freedom. “They’re thinking of Polly Klaas”—the 12-year-old girl whose abduction and murder led to the passage of California’s Three Strikes Law in 1994. Young Women’s Freedom Center, one of Reimagine Freedom’s associated organizations, works with young women and nonbinary and trans youth in the East Bay and beyond, many of whom are themselves being exploited: abused or pushed into sex work, either by an individual or by economic necessity. Nearly all of them have been arrested multiple times and have spent time in jail, according to the freedom center. A system that only recognizes Polly Klaases as victims inevitably ends up drawing women and girls who don’t look like her into its net.  

“One of the things that became clear to me was the ways in which women were being targeted by the system,” said Gina-Clayton Johnson, who runs the Essie Justice Group, an organization for women with incarcerated loved ones. “Women are being incarcerated at rates that outpace men today… Our impulses for punitivity absolutely have extended directly to women who have been in situations of domestic violence.” The mandatory arrest policies instituted across the country did result in more men being arrested for domestic violence, but they had another, unintended, consequence: Arrests of women increased too. 

Price’s history helps illustrate why. After she graduated from Berkeley Law, the father of her child, who had been abusive during their relationship, kept showing up at her house and refusing to leave. Left with few options, Price would call the police, who seemed to grow more and more callous toward her predicament. One day, things escalated.

“I was outside, and they told me that they were going to give my 3-month-old nursing baby to this person,” she told me. She speaks calmly about this now, but it took her many years to be able to talk about it. “And I said: ‘No, no, no, no, that cannot happen.’ So I went back into the house to get my baby. And they dragged me out of my house and took me to jail.”

The DA’s office chose to move forward with the case, charging her with disorderly conduct and resisting arrest, and urged her to take a plea. Goodmark said that this unnecessary prosecution of survivors still happens regularly, even though prosecutors have the discretion to decline to bring cases. “There are lots and lots of reasons that women are pleading to things that they could have strong defenses to,” she told me.

Price, however, knew her way around the law, and she knew lawyers. Her boss at the time agreed to represent her. So she went to trial: “I told the jury what happened, and they were like, ‘Are you kidding me?’” She was quickly acquitted. “But just going through that was hella scary,” she said. “I was a young single mom, I was waiting on my bar results—you know, they just could have destroyed my whole life.”

Price had experienced, not for the first time, how the state could harm rather than help victims of abuse—what she now calls being a “double survivor.” As a young mother, she had an idea of how she would have wanted the police and DA’s office to respond, she said, “but I knew that from my own experience with the Bay Area Defense Committee for Battered Women that that was not part of the system.” 

Today, though, she’s come to believe that the system could function differently. “I got to learn to be a lawyer and to use the law in some really powerful ways to be an advocate for women,” Price told me. For many years, she brought lawsuits on behalf of women forced to endure sexual harassment in the workplace, including many prison guards. Fighting against the California penal system underscored to her just how much mass incarceration harms everyone. 

Still, Price said, when it came to the idea of running for DA, “I had to be persuaded that a civil rights lawyer could really have an impact.” The single most important thing that changed her mind, she said, was a TED talk by a young Black former prosecutor named Adam Foss, who discussed his epiphany about the power that prosecutors hold over the lives of people they charge, and how they might practice differently. (Foss became an influential advocate for criminal legal reform, but was plagued by allegations of inappropriate conduct during his time at the Suffolk DA’s office. The Manhattan DA charged him with rape this August). 

Being confronted by the racial disparities on display in the East Bay further galvanized Price. “If you are a Black person in Alameda County, you are 20 times more likely to be incarcerated than a white person,” she said. “That’s an unacceptable, intolerable level of racial injustice that just called me to action.” 

Though she has been targeted by the criminal legal system and worked for several years as a community defense attorney in San Francisco, Price has mostly used civil law to advance gender justice. If she wins in November, she would take over an office that has long used violence against women to justify opposition to criminal legal system reforms. Historically, DAs “bought into the idea that they could be the people who saved victims of intimate partner violence,” said Goodmark. “You also see some prosecutors become very out-front advocates for the role of the criminal legal system in ending gender-based violence. And they start doing that kind of hardcore lobbying that says: ‘The work is done by us. We are the central players in this system. And if you just resource us properly, we’ll be able to do that work.’”

Price has said she wants to take a closer look at both of O’Malley’s signature initiatives: the Family Justice Center, a clearinghouse for domestic violence and sexual abuse; and the Human Exploitation and Trafficking (HEAT) unit. She fears that both programs do little to prevent gender-based violence, use victims against their will to obtain prosecutions, and often fail to provide women with the resources they need to escape an abusive situation. HEAT, she said, “is heralded as this innovative program, but there’s so many people that are not being served.” She said she would not prosecute women for engaging in sex work, and suggested other ways to enforce anti-sex-trafficking measures without criminalizing individuals—like targeting hotel chains that facilitate sex trafficking.

O’Malley’s office defended their work on HEAT and the Family Justice Center in a statement, stressing their partnerships with non-governmental organizations that employ survivors of gender-based violence. When asked whether the office requires victims of intimate partner violence to testify against their abusers, the office replied that the HEAT unit doesn’t compel victims of sex trafficking to testify, but did not respond to a request for clarification about the policy toward other victims of interpersonal violence.

To many local advocates, programs like HEAT are primarily drivers of system involvement and incarceration: “To me, it’s just another kind of disguise for law enforcement to access dollars that they shouldn’t have,” said Nowlan, calling on Alameda County to implement an expansive diversion program as an alternative. 

Julia Arroyo, the co-executive director of Young Women’s Freedom Center, criticized the complicated network of DAs, agencies, and community organizations that try to respond to issues of abuse and exploitation as both paternalistic and ineffectual. “You just kind of get entangled into this system, and it creates this hyper-focus and supervision on your life, but often people are still needing to get connected to housing or different resources,” she said. “I know what it feels like to be criminalized, and I know what it feels like to be wrapped with love and support from a community that will not let you fail.” 

“We envision community solutions, we envision community interruption, we also envision community healing,” said Nowlan. “And that does have to happen outside of the system.”

Goodmark said that DAs should stay away from restorative justice initiatives because of the implicit threat of prosecution if participants drop out, a view shared by some practitioners and critics of the criminal legal system.

Price vehemently disagrees. “Our goal is to keep people out of the system and to create a pathway that does not involve punitive prosecution,” she said. The philosophy of restorative justice, she said, can also serve a modus operandi that elevates crime victims’ needs rather than using them to secure as many prosecutions as possible. 

Price says that DA’s offices can and should stop compelling victims to participate in cases against their will and stop pursuing charges against survivors of intimate partner violence who defend themselves—positions in line with activists who say she should try to narrow the system’s scope rather than expand it in the name of gender justice. “My biggest, I think, piece of advice to any prosecutor is to shrink your footprint tremendously,” said Clayton-Johnson of the Essie Justice Group. “I think that the most important thing is to lean far away from seeing incarceration as the solution to gender-based harm and violence.” 

Clayton-Johnson also urged prosecutors who want to focus on gender justice to look at large-scale criminal behavior that is rarely enforced but affects people’s ability to lead productive and happy lives, like environmental racism and wage theft. “There’s a root cause orientation that Black feminism requires,” she said. “To just start to really think systemically about how I can curb harm—is what I would be excited for a prosecutor to do.” 

In other words, to go back to the original solutions of the second wave feminist movement, before it veered down the path of criminalization—but to do so from the very heart of the criminal legal system. Is such a thing possible, or is it a contradiction in terms? 

Price knows that she’s wading into murky terrain. But her life work has taught her that it’s worth a try. “Personally, professionally, I have learned how this system works,” she said. “And I very much believe that people made this system, and we can remake it.”

*This story was updated to clarify Nowlan’s current job title. 

The post The Anti-Carceral Feminist Who Wants to Be DA appeared first on Bolts.

In 2017, Seattle implemented a democratic reform that accomplished the seemingly impossible, diversifying and growing the pool of people giving money to political campaigns, and making city races more competitive in the process.

Every local election cycle, Seattle gives each eligible resident four $25 “democracy vouchers” to donate to candidates of their choosing. To opt into the program and receive these vouchers, candidates must agree to certain conditions, like limiting their spending and participating in debates—and most do. 

The program has attracted glowing national attention, but so far no city has capitalized on Seattle’s success to implement its own version. The tide now may be turning as advocates for campaign finance reform hope to bring democracy vouchers to California, with Oakland leading the way. 

On Monday night, the Oakland City Council unanimously voted to place a democracy vouchers referendum on the city’s November ballot, with all six council members present voting aye.

If Oakland voters approve the measure, a new Democracy Dollars program would provide four $25 vouchers for every Oakland voter to donate to eligible city and school board candidates starting in 2024. The referendum on the November ballot also includes other provisions meant to improve campaign finance in the city, including lower campaign contribution limits and new donor disclosure requirements 

The measure is championed by a broad coalition of voting rights groups, including ​​the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, League of Women Voters Oakland, and California Common Cause, as well as community-led organizations that also advocate for immigrant rights, housing development, and preschool education. 

The coalition is making the case that creating a Democracy Dollars program would engage more voters, encourage a more diverse set of candidates, make political giving more transparent, redistribute power to poorer and less white areas, and combat the power of special interests. 

“It gives political giving power to families and neighborhoods that would otherwise have zero disposable income to donate to politicians,” Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, told Bolts.  

At a press conference before the council’s vote, Oakland City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas echoed that call. “This is a transformative opportunity because it empowers our residents who historically have not participated in elections to select and support candidates who they feel best represent and meet their needs.” 

Reformers in other California cities, especially Los Angeles and San Diego, are closely watching Oakland’s process and hope to follow suit in upcoming years. 

“You see people scrabbling and fighting for every bit of improvement because they want to make a stronger democracy,” said Amy Tobia, a steering committee member of the Voter’s Voice coalition, which is leading the campaign to adopt democracy vouchers in San Diego. 

—

An irony of American elections is that, since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, we can make almost limitless political donations, but few of us give at all. Just 1.4 percent of the U.S. population contributed more than $200 to federal candidates, PACs, parties, or outside groups in the 2019-2020 cycle. It’s the same story in local politics. In the cycle before Seattle implemented democracy vouchers, the top 4 percent of political donors donated as much as the bottom 64 percent. Just 391 people—less than 1 percent of adults in the city— accounted for more than quarter of all electoral giving. 

In Oakland, too, the wealthy dominate political giving. Small donors, those giving less than $100, made up just 6 percent of all candidate funding, according to MapLight, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the influence of money in politics. MapLight’s analysis also stresses that the city’s three majority-white zip codes, which house a fifth of the city’s population, were responsible for 45 percent of the contributions made by Oakland residents in the 2020 cycle. Oakland advocates are also alarmed by the increasing amount of money pouring in from outside the city—$1.1 million in 2020, 36 percent of money given to candidates, compared to $231,000 in 2014, 22 percent of the total donations. 

“We have hyper concentrated political giving in the hands of a tiny and totally non-representative slice of Oakland,” says Stein. “The majority of Oakland, which is working class and communities of color, has virtually no political giving power—and that changes who can run for and win, and it changes what ideas are taken seriously.”

To combat the role of private money in elections, fourteen states have implemented one of two public financing programs. The first requires candidates to collect small contributions from a certain number of donors to demonstrate that they have public support. In exchange, they get money from the state. In the second, the government matches private campaign donations, and sometimes increases them by a certain multiplier. In Los Angeles, it’s up to six. In New York City, it’s up to eight. In Maryland, it depends on the size of contribution, with smaller donations getting more of a boost.

Tom Latkowski, cofounder of LA for Democracy Vouchers, a Los Angeles-based organization, and the author of a book on the subject, argues that these programs are ineffective. “Fundamentally, what matching funds do is they move the center of power from the super rich, who can give the maximum contribution limit, to just the very rich,” he told Bolts. “The matching funds do nothing to help the vast majority of Angelenos who aren’t donating at all.” 

Latkowski thinks democracy vouchers are a stronger solution to the problem of concentrated giving because they redistribute political power even to those who don’t have disposable income.  

Every resident is a potential donor under the democracy voucher system. In Seattle, political hopefuls have expanded well beyond traditional fundraising avenues, collecting vouchers at house parties, outside supermarkets, and in housing complexes for low-income seniors. The results have dramatically stretched the boundaries of political donations. 

Since Seattle’s program was implemented, the number of donors per race has gone up by 350 percent, and candidates reported hundreds of thousands more in small donations of under $200, reducing their reliance on a small batch of wealthy donors, according to a study conducted by Alan Griffith, a scholar at the University of Washington. 

The voucher users were also more likely to be young and lower-income contributors compared to cash donors, according to a 2020 study conducted by researchers at Stony Brook and Georgetown Universities, and many of them were new to political contributions. Oakland activists are hoping they can similarly engage residents who are currently disengaged from the process; too many people are “usually pushed to the side,” said liz suk, executive director of Oakland Rising, a non-profit collaborative that’s advocated for the democracy vouchers.

Wayne Barnett, executive director of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, the public agency that oversees the city’s voucher program, says voucher use is on the rise and being used by an increasingly diverse pool of residents in the city as people become more familiar with it. Barnett also says the system is fostering a more competitive political environment. “We just had a very contentious selection season, and we didn’t have that before,” he told Bolts. 

Since 2015, the number of city candidates in Seattle has nearly doubled. In addition, the margins of victory have been lower, and turnout has increased. Proponents of the vouchers program attribute these shifts to the reform, pointing out that it allows candidates without personal wealth or access to affluent donors to fundraise enough to run viable campaigns and to interest more voters.

An example is Teresa Mosqueda, a former labor organizer who ran for council in 2017 on a platform of affordable housing. She launched her campaign while working full time, renting a one-bedroom apartment, and still paying off student loans. 

She said the democracy vouchers program, and the knowledge it gave her that she would have access to small donor contributions, pushed her to run. “That really was a green light saying go,” she told Vox in 2018. “If I was out door-belling in the evening for three hours or so, I could walk away with $500, $600, even $700 in vouchers on my own.” In total, Mosqueda received nearly $300,000 from democracy vouchers.

Mosqueda won her race in 2017 and ran for another term in 2021. She opted into the democracy voucher program again, collected over 10,000 vouchers, worth more than $250,000, and won re-election. 

Seattle’s current mayor, city attorney, and seven of the nine city councilors used the program for either their latest primary, general election, or both. 

—

In Oakland, activists told Bolts, the push for democracy vouchers picked up in part out of frustration over recent school board races. In 2016, billionaire Michael Bloomberg gave $300,000 to the political action committee sponsored by an Oakland-based nonprofit that supports charter schools. That group then spent $153,000 in support of a pro-charter candidate, who won his race. Two years later, the committee spent a similar sum, and again its candidate won. And in 2020, pro-charter groups poured more than $1 million into the Oakland School Board Director election. They won three of the four races. 

More broadly, during the last four elections in Oakland, 77 percent of the contested races were won by the candidate who raised the most, according to MapLight. 

A few years ago, groups like Common Cause California and the League of Women Voters Oakland began discussing the idea of democracy dollars, but the proponents aren’t just “the usual suspects on money in politics,” says Stein. “We are working together with organizations that represent a diverse set of Oakland communities that are closer to the issues that these communities are facing,” like the Asian Law Caucus, Oakland Rising, and the ACLU. 

That group gained allies like Dan Kalb, a city councilmember, and Nikki Fortunato Bas, the City Council President, who pushed for the vote this week. 

“It’s really only a few million dollars a year to be able to highlight and expand our democratic values of our democratic system for local elections,” said Kalb during a press conference before the vote. “And I think that’s a small price to pay.” 

Now that the council has placed the issue on the ballot, proponents must educate and convince voters. “It takes some time to explain the idea,” says Stein. “But once it’s explained, people have a universally positive reaction to it.” 

The Oakland measure is different from Seattle’s in several ways. For one, it applies to more offices, including school board races, a choice by local advocates who designed the measure that reflects the city’s recent political history. 

Under the legislation, vouchers would automatically be mailed to registered voters in Oakland, and anyone over 18 who’s been a resident in the city for 30 days or more could request them.  

Oakland’s bill would also use a different funding source. Seattle’s program cost nearly $5.5 million over 2019-2020, money that is coming from a property tax that voters approved alongside the democracy voucher program in 2015. For a $450,000 property, it costs about $9 per year. In Oakland, the cost of $2 million a year will be funded from the general fund. suk says advocates pushed for this to not “burden our homeowners.”

Democracy vouchers have come with their pushback, controversy, and limitations. The Stranger, a Seattle publication, recently reported on a canvasser who was accused of deceptively marketing blank vouchers. Instead of explaining that signing the paper would give money to a candidate, he portrayed it as a way to “help the homeless.” 

Barnett says the commission is considering banning for-profit voucher gatherers. For residents who may be worried about fraud, the Seattle program offers a searchable database of all the democracy vouchers redeemed by candidates. 

California advocates hope that Oakland’s vote snowballs across the rest of the state. Organizers are now debating how they want to get the measure on the ballot for voter approval in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego, Fresno, and Orange County by 2024. Collecting signatures is time- and labor-intensive, but going through the city council can be politically risky, says Tobia, the San Diego advocate.

“You’re asking the people for whom the current system has worked very well to make it more accessible to others, and that’s a big ask,” she says. 

Still, advocates think that democracy vouchers could be similar to another reform that started slowly at the local level and then accelerated. “I see democracy vouchers as maybe 10 or 15 years behind ranked choice voting,” said Latkowski, in reference to a change in election procedures that just in recent years has swept Alaska, Maine, Utah, and New York City.

The post In California Cities, a New Frontier for Public Financing of Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Ahern has been sheriff since 2006, but he never once faced an opponent in any of his four prior elections. During Ahern’s long tenure, his county jail drew condemnation for its dangerous conditions. Santa Rita was the deadliest lockup in Northern California; a KTVU investigation found that 58 people have died there since 2014. A lawsuit alleging neglect of incarcerated people with mental health needs led to a massive settlement that will require the department to overhaul its treatment and suicide prevention practices. 

In the first contested election he ever faced, on June 7, Ahern only received 31 percent of the vote. Sanchez received 53 percent, and clinched the win without needing to go through a November runoff. 

Sanchez’s win is a stark reminder of how often local officials with immense power over the lives of their constituents, especially people of color and the poor and mentally ill, stay in power year after year regardless of their popularity, with no one stepping forth to challenge them. Local activists told Bolts that they have found it difficult to generate public outrage toward jail deaths, but they forced attention to the issue during the campaign and expressed satisfaction on Wednesday that voters seemed to have taken notice.

“Voters did not only overwhelmingly reject Ahern’s leadership, they rejected his failed harmful policies that have only resulted in countless lawsuits and loss of human lives,” Jose Bernal, the organizing director of Oakland-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, told Bolts via email.

Sanchez channeled the criticisms of Ahern’s tenure in her campaign. “He’s been of the status quo for 15 years,” she told Bolts in an April interview. She vowed to institute better communication with the public about jail deaths, establish support for families of people who die inside the jail, and create more programming so that people have work opportunities when they leave jail. At a January candidate forum, she said that people with mental illness do not belong in jail, calling for more alternative solutions. 

Sanchez also denounced Ahern for collaborating with ICE deportation orders and for promoting the militarization of law enforcement, including giving a platform to the Oath Keepers, a far-right militia. 

But Sanchez will also enter the role as a consummate insider. Since early 2020, she has been the commander in charge of Santa Rita. 

Sanchez has faced pointed criticism of her own record overseeing the jail from local advocates. “While Sheriff Ahern bears the ultimate responsibility for the atrocities that have taken place in the jail, it is important to note that Sanchez is also at the top of the chain of command as the Santa Rita Jail commander,” Bernal told Bolts. 

When Sanchez spoke with Bolts in April, she acknowledged that Santa Rita had not transformed under her leadership. But she blamed the stasis on Ahern’s intransigence and said she had proposed changes that had been rejected by the sheriff. “It’s definitely a paramilitary kind of organization,” she told Bolts of the chain of command in the sheriff’s department. She also stressed her efforts to reduce the population in solitary confinement, saying that it had gone down from approximately 150 to around 50. She referred to it as “administrative separation,” the department’s preferred euphemism for solitary confinement. 

Similar results played out elsewhere in California, with other sheriffs under fire for abuses in their department losing their seats or performing underwhelmingly in the June 7 elections. In Los Angeles, where ballots are also still being counted, the unpopular but high-visibility incumbent Alex Villanueva has received a bit less than 32 percent of the vote as of publication to retired Long Beach police chief Robert Luna’s nearly 26 percent. This is the lowest result for a sitting Los Angeles sheriff since at least the 1940s, and it leaves Villanueva in a challenging position for this fall’s runoff. 

In San Mateo, the county just south of San Francisco, Christina Corpus beat six-year incumbent Carlos Bolanos. Corpus campaigned on a reform platform, criticizing her boss’s collaboration with ICE and advocating for better mental health services, including a mental health crisis response model led by clinicians and specially trained deputies. 

Corpus, like Sanchez, is an insider of the office she is now set to take over: she works as a captain in the San Mateo Sheriff’s Department. And in the upcoming Los Angeles County runoff, Luna’s tenure as Long Beach police chief is not without its own controversies, including a pattern of entrapping gay men in sting operations and a host of wrongful death and racial discrimination lawsuits. The department ranks only two percentage points higher than LASD on Police Scorecard, an online database that compiles data on law enforcement departments around the country.

California law requires that sheriff candidates have law enforcement backgrounds, which limits the field of possible candidates. The specter of Villanueva’s about-face after his 2018 win in Los Angeles—from would-be reformer who charmed local Democratic and progressive organizations, to defiant leader who reflexively opposes any attempt to increase oversight or accountability, and has reversed many of the modest reforms of his predecessor—hangs over the state’s sheriff elections. Many activists in Los Angeles and Alameda stayed out of the races, maintaining that these departments cannot be reformed from the inside and seeking other routes to limiting their reach. A local coalition in Los Angeles is proposing a charter amendment to codify civilian oversight and create a mechanism for impeaching the sheriff, for instance.

In Alameda, local groups like the Ella Baker Center, Oakland Rising, and the Anti-Police Terror Project have also been sharply critical of the consent decree that is meant to improve conditions at Santa Rita, arguing that it will only serve to confer more money and authority on the sheriff’s department. They are instead pushing for measures that would reduce the jail population and the sheriff’s powers in the first place.

“Real change and real safety will only come when we begin to see significant decreases in the jail population, significant divestment from the jail and significant re-investments into non-carceral health affirming resources, such as outpatient mental health services, housing and living wage jobs,” Bernal said.

In conversation with Bolts, Sanchez approved of the terms of the consent decree, saying, “We should have been able to identify this on our own.” She said some of the issues with Santa Rita stem from Ahern’s lack of focus on the jail and subsequent understaffing and underfunding, which are matters that the consent decree aims to address. 

When Bolts asked if she would work to implement the consent decree in a way that aligned with community groups’ demands for the department, Sanchez spoke of the importance of partnering with local organizations to meet the needs of people struggling with mental illness and homelessness, especially around the transition out of jail and back into the community. Sanchez also said she would be open to asking county officials to reallocate some of the funds that the consent decree allocates towards jail staff towards community organizations who work on continuity care. 

Soon enough, Sanchez will be the one in charge of making these decisions, and Bernal, who has been critical of the sheriff-elect for remaining too vague in her platform, will be watching. “We are prepared and ready to hold anyone in that office accountable,” he told Bolts. 

The post Oakland’s Sheriff Is Ousted After a Long Tenure Leading Deadly Jail appeared first on Bolts.

Maurice Monk, who died inside Alameda County’s notorious Santa Rita Jail last year on November 15, was there because he had threatened a bus driver who told him to put his mask on—and because his family could not afford the $2,500 necessary for his bail. He was 45 years old, the father of two teenage children, and the brother of two sisters, Tiffany and Elvira. He suffered from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, and nine days before his death—because he was in jail—he had missed a shot of antipsychotic medication he’d been receiving regularly for years. 

Elvira was a fierce advocate for Maurice, managing his medication and doctors appointments. When he was sent to Santa Rita, she tried over and over to get his prescription information to the jail, terrified of him missing a dose. There were a series of bureaucratic hoops to jump through: obtaining permission to send the information directly rather than wait for Kaiser to do it; a series of emails that went nowhere. Elvira kept calling. Finally, the jail gave her a fax number. Elvira felt relieved, but shortly thereafter, she heard a knock at the door. When she opened it, sheriff’s deputies were standing there. 

“They told me that my brother was deceased,” Elvira recalled. The deputies had nothing else for her: no paperwork, no proof of his death, nothing about how or why her brother had died. “They just said, ‘Maurice Monk passed away.’” Maurice had died the day before—he had been dead while his sister was scrambling to get him his prescription. “The day that he died, they could have came and told me that day,” Elvira told Bolts. 

Cases like Maurice’s are not an anomaly at Santa Rita Jail. Gregory Ahern’s 15-year tenure as the sheriff-coroner of Alameda County—a populous East Bay county that is home to Oakland and Berkeley—has seen a string of deaths at the lockup, leaving grieving families struggling to accept the loss of their loved ones behind bars. Fifty-eight people have died in custody there since 2014, making Santa Rita the deadliest jail in Northern California. Repeated allegations of neglect for incarcerated people with mental health needs led to a federal class action lawsuit, Babu v. Ahern, that recently ended in a massive settlement requiring officials to overhaul mental health care and suicide prevention at jail. Under the settlement, the Santa Rita Jail will now be under court oversight for at least the next six years. 

Ahern is now seeking a fifth term, and somehow this is the first cycle he has faced challengers: he initially ran unopposed in 2006 and became sheriff by default. Mental health care and solitary confinement at Santa Rita have emerged as key issues of the race given years of deaths and legal challenges tied to lax treatment at the jail. Both of Ahern’s opponents as well as many organizers in the community blame the sheriff, who has presided over the lockup for years, for the deaths and dangerous conditions that have occurred on his watch. 

Yesenia Sanchez, one of the candidates running against Ahern, became the division commander in charge of Santa Rita Jail just after the pandemic started. She is now in the tricky position of both criticizing the status quo and defending her own record at a time when local activists say conditions have not improved at the lockup. 

The other candidate in the race is San Francisco Police Department veteran JoAnn Walker, who has focused on preventing jail deaths, reducing solitary confinement, and improving mental health care for incarcerated people as core campaign issues.

The three candidates will share one ballot in a nonpartisan June 7 primary, and if no one receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the top two contenders will face off in November. 

Whoever wins will be responsible for implementing the consent decree, which has been heralded as a liberal victory by the San Francisco law firm that litigated it, but bitterly opposed by much of Oakland’s activist community, as well as a number of people currently incarcerated at Santa Rita. Critics of the settlement say it only gives more money and power to the sheriff’s department. The problems with Santa Rita, they say, run too deep to be fixed by more funding, more staff, or a new sheriff—they can only be adequately addressed by removing the jail from the equation entirely. “The county should be focusing its energy into looking at preventative resources and alternatives to incarceration, so that folks don’t end up in jail to begin with,” said Jose Bernal, the organizing director at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. 

A recent investigation of Santa Rita by the U.S. Department of Justice concluded that poor treatment of incarcerated people with mental illness there violated the Constitution and the Americans with Disabilities Act. “Clinicians often provide seriously mentally ill prisoners nothing more than handouts that list coping skills or describe deep breathing techniques that may help reduce stress,” the investigation observes. In 2021, a state audit found that there was inadequate information sharing between mental health providers and Santa Rita jail staff regarding the mental health status and needs of incarcerated people, and that jail staff neglected to screen everyone coming into the jail for mental health issues.

Moreover, in-custody deaths at Santa Rita have cost Alameda County millions of dollars in the form of payouts for the families of the deceased, including the largest wrongful death payout in a civil rights case in California history.

Up for re-election and under increased scrutiny, Ahern recently noted at a candidate forum that his department was using the recent audit as a guide to help reduce the number of people in isolation and overall jail deaths. Why had it taken 15 years, a DOJ investigation, multiple lawsuits, and a federal consent decree to make changes at the jail? Ahern told Bolts he has tried to make reforms in the past but lacked necessary funding from the county’s board of supervisors, which controls the purse strings for the sheriff’s department.  

“We were doing the best that we could,” Ahern said.  

In 2020, Ahern asked for and received a $318 million expansion despite the county’s budget crisis. Activists in the community are highly skeptical that lack of funding is the root of problems at the jail. “It’s a ridiculous statement for him to say that he doesn’t have enough funding when the rest of county services are continuing to suffer because of the bloated budget that the sheriff’s department has,” liz suk, the executive director of Oakland Rising Action, told Bolts. 

suk also criticized Sanchez’s more recent tenure as division commander in charge of the jail. “We have continued to see high rates of COVID infection happening at Santa Rita,” she said, observing that jail deaths have also continued to occur under Sanchez. 

Sanchez, for her part, blamed Ahern for why more hasn’t changed at Santa Rita during her tenure, saying that she had brought up ideas for reforms that seemed to go nowhere, including changes to how the jail manages in-custody deaths and a better on-site presence for Root & Rebound, a community organization that provides post-release support for incarcerated people and currently occupies a trailer in the jail’s parking lot. “You would think that being a division commander, I would have ultimate say on anything that goes on at the jail, but it’s just not the structure,” Sanchez said. “It’s definitely a paramilitary kind of organization.” 

JoAnn Walker has the benefit of being the outsider candidate—at least as much as anyone can be under California’s sheriff candidate requirements, which since 1989 have required a law enforcement background. “I have not heard either of the candidates take responsibility for what is going on at Santa Rita Jail,” Walker told Bolts. “They’ve been in power now for many, many years.” 

Walker, who has a background in telephone crisis counseling and has trained others in de-escalation and crisis support, says unequivocally that “the jail is not the place for anyone who is suffering from a mental illness to heal.” She supports the county board of supervisor’s “Care First Jails Last” resolution, which aims to decouple mental health care from incarceration.   

Walker has received endorsements from some local progressive groups, including Our Revolution. But suk and Bernal both told Bolts that their organizations are staying away from the sheriff’s race. “We’re focused on reducing the overall power and size of the sheriff’s office so that no matter who’s in that office, they don’t have the same reach and power as their predecessor,” Bernal told Bolts.

The first hurdle for a person with mental health needs arriving at Santa Rita is the intake process. Ahern claimed that he has improved how the jail conducts mental health screenings, adding more nursing staff and addressing mental health during the intake process. “In many instances, we have a very positive environment for people that have suffered a mental health crisis,” Ahern said. “In many cases,” he added, “we are providing treatment and care for those individuals that they would not be receiving otherwise.” 

Santa Rita has a ‘behavioral health unit’ where people with mental health needs are sent. There, Ahern said, incarcerated people with mental health needs are provided medication that “they may or may not have been utilizing correctly while they’re out on the street.”   

The sheriff’s characterization ignores the barriers Elvira Monk experienced trying to get her brother’s prescription transferred to Santa Rita last year. “There needs to be a better way for the family to be able to get medical records up there,” she said. Maurice Monk was one of three people who died while being held in the jail’s behavioral health unit within a single month in 2021. 

Walker criticized the current intake process, saying that newcomers to Santa Rita determined to have mental health needs shouldn’t be sent to the behavioral health unit—in fact, they shouldn’t be in jail at all. “If it is a yes for any of the mental health questions that are asked [on the intake form], then that person must be transported to a hospital so their medical needs can be assessed,” she said. When asked if she believed that the behavioral health unit could not adequately meet the needs of people with mental health issues, Walker answered with a question: “Well, does it work? And if it is working, why have we had [58] people who have died since 2014?”

Jose Bernal has personally experienced the toll that incarceration can take on a person’s mind and spirit. “Jail exasperates people’s mental health conditions,” he told me. “It is not and will never be a viable, legitimate place for mental health.” Solitary confinement, in particular, can be a uniquely damaging experience for someone with a history of mental illness—but it is paradoxically often used as a tool to manage incarcerated people experiencing mental health crises.

The Department of Justice investigation found that people with “serious mental illness” are regularly placed in isolation inside the jail, which has led to outcomes such as “prisoners swallowing objects, not eating, smearing or eating feces, banging their heads against the wall, and attempting or completing suicide.” When asked if the jail puts people diagnosed with mental health conditions in isolation, Ahern demurred, saying “based on each individual’s jail classification, we monitor where they can be housed.” He also quibbled over the language used to describe isolation conditions—the jail, Ahern says, doesn’t practice solitary confinement but rather “administrative separation.” Although people in “ad-sep” are confined to their cells for 23 hours a day, that shouldn’t be considered solitary, the sheriff argued, because “there are six pods to a housing unit, and they have access to communicate with everyone in their pod.”

Ahern also called it “inflammatory, if not insulting” to say that jail deaths have been high on his watch.  

Both Ahern and Sanchez told Bolts that they are working to reduce the number of people in solitary conditions and that the current count of people in “administrative separation” has decreased significantly; on April 8, Sanchez said the number was at 57. Walker says that number is still an indication that the jail’s current mental health care services are not working. Walker committed to working towards fully ending the practice of “administrative separation” at Santa Rita. “We have got to bring in our community-based organizations and let them take the lead on dealing with mental health issues because that is their specialty,” she said. 

Elvira Monk says that she continues to deal with problems at Santa Rita jail. She says communication from the sheriff’s department about her brother’s death has been sporadic and incomplete; in late April, more than five months after her brother died, officials sent her a death certificate that labeled his death “natural” and blamed heart disease. “They keep giving me the runaround,” Elvira said. Her experience struggling to find answers, too, is not unique: other families have detailed similarly maddening experiences trying to get more information about what happened to their loved one inside Santa Rita Jail. 

Sanchez said the office should better communicate with family members of people who die in jail as well as the public when tragedies occur. The fact that we don’t give the family of those who lose loved ones incarcerated any information at all—it’s definitely not the way to treat family” she said. “It’s not humane in my eyes.”

In-custody deaths at Santa Rita also highlights the issue that, like many counties in California, the sheriff of Alameda doubles as its coroner—which raises questions about the thoroughness and independence of inquiries into deaths in custody.  “While it’s true that the sheriff isn’t personally conducting the autopsy, the person that is is reporting directly to the sheriff,” said Bernal. “There’s a clear conflict of interest.” State law doesn’t require independent autopsies for people who die in law enforcement custody.

Ahern rejects the idea of separating the coroner’s duties from the sheriff’s department. Walker said she would be open to separating the two if it’s “something that people want,” and Sanchez said she needed to look into the issue more but did support independent autopsies in cases of in-custody deaths. 

Elvira still finds herself struggling to accept her brother’s loss. For a while after Maurice passed, she says she was consumed by trying to find answers for his sudden absence. “It was like: I want to know why. I want to know why. I want to know why.” 

In death as in life, Elvira has continued to act as her brother’s champion, reaching out to other families who’ve lost loved ones at Santa Rita, working to organize a candlelight vigil, and continuing to contact the jail, demanding updates. “It was no reason why he shouldn’t have got that next medication,” she said.

Updated with information from Maurice Monk’s death certificate, which officials provided to his sister the day this story was initially published

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