On his last day in office early this year, San Diego County Sheriff Bill Gore received a scathing indictment from state auditors about deadly conditions inside the local jails he’d operated for more than a decade. The audit, which found that jail deaths in San Diego County were among the highest in the state, concluded that inadequate treatment and monitoring for detainees with mental illness or other health problems “likely contributed to in-custody deaths.”

In a letter released February 3, California Auditor Michael Tilden urged the governor and state lawmakers to intervene, saying that neither the local sheriff’s department nor the citizen-governed board tasked with monitoring it had adequately investigated deaths at the jail or taken corrective action to prevent more from occurring. 

“In light of the ongoing risk to inmate safety, the Sheriff’s Department’s inadequate response to deaths, and the lack of effective independent oversight, we believe that the Legislature must take action to ensure that the Sheriff’s Department implements meaningful changes,” Tilden wrote in his letter. 

Any future attempts to force jail reforms in San Diego will dovetail with new leadership at the sheriff’s department. And due to the string of scandals and deaths on Gore’s watch, dangerous jail conditions have become an unusually prominent issue as a crowded field of candidates run to replace him in San Diego’s local elections on June 7. All three frontrunners have pledged to make the local jails safer and reduce deaths, but they are bringing vastly different commitments to the table. Pointing to the loss of life, The San Diego Union-Tribune’s editorial board recently called this sheriff’s race “the most consequential local election on the June 7 ballot.”

Michele Deitch, director of the Prison and Jail Innovation Lab at the University of Texas at Austin’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, says it was high time for deeper political scrutiny of local jails.

“Increased media attention to jails in recent years has led to greater public awareness of high rates of deaths, suicides, crowding, violence, and the spread of COVID, among other problems,” Deitch told Bolts. “And the public has also started to realize how many people, especially poor people of color and people with mental health challenges, are being held there unnecessarily simply because they can’t make bail or because there are no mental health beds in the community.” 

“There are public health implications and cost implications to what happens in our local jails,” Deitch added. “It’s become increasingly clear that jails are a part of our community, not apart from them.”

Eighteen people died in San Diego jails last year, compared to 16 people who died while incarcerated in New York City’s notorious jail system—a much larger one that has made headlines for squalid and deadly conditions. Ten people have died in the custody of San Diego jails so far this year. 

The spate of deaths in 2021 led to at least two lawsuits and other families are now exploring legal action. On May 24, the family of Lester Daniel Marroquin, referred to as “Danny” by his family, sued the sheriff’s department for moving the 35-year-old into solitary confinement after he’d repeatedly attempted suicide. Less than two hours after being transferred, he was dead from water intoxication.

“Mr. Marroquin should have been in a safety cell on May 30, 2021,” the lawsuit says. “At a minimum, he should have been in Enhanced Observation Housing”—a unit for people at risk of suicide—“with safety checks conducted at least every fifteen minutes.”

Gore announced his retirement in January, amid mounting multi million-dollar legal settlements paid out by the county to resolve lawsuits by grieving families of people who died in his jails. Days after Gore stepped down in February, a team of civil rights attorneys filed a class-action lawsuit asking a federal court to force the sheriff’s department to make a series of changes aimed at improving care for incarcerated people with mental illness and physical disabilities. In April, a study commissioned by the county’s Citizens’ Law Enforcement Review Board echoed the state auditor’s conclusions, as well as that of a six-month investigation by the Union-Tribune: San Diego jails had the highest mortality rate among California’s large jail systems.

Undersheriff Kelly Martinez, who has worked in the department for more than three decades and is now a frontrunner in the race to replace Gore, acknowledges that the sheriff’s department needs to change—just not so much that it rankles the powerful Deputy Sheriffs’ Association of San Diego County, which is supporting her campaign along with more than a dozen prominent local lawmakers. A recent internal survey by the association shows that members think the county has swung too far to the left—“Marxist” was used multiple times in survey responses — and that local leaders are too soft on crime. And a recent ad by the deputies association attacking one of Martinez’s leading opponents, former sheriff’s commander Dave Myers, drew criticism for showing Myers’ skin slowly darkening as he morphs into a demon. 

Martinez was part of the department’s leadership team that quibbled with the methodology of the recent blistering state audit, but she has also pledged to implement the state’s recommendations—such as having a mental health clinician present during the jail intake process to evaluate detainees and creating a better system for tracking and responding to requests for medical attention. Martinez has also beefed up the department’s open data portal and vowed to address plummeting morale among jail workers and a staffing crunch that has forced mandatory overtime shifts. 

“This is probably the toughest time in the 37 years that I’ve been on the department,” Martinez said in an interview with Bolts. “But I see a path forward. We have the right priorities and we have a path in place and we have the right Board of Supervisors that’s funding all of the things that we need to do.” 

Martinez insisted that she is not her predecessor. “I’m very different in my approach and my style,” she said. “I’m just a different person. I don’t want to be judged by who other sheriffs were. I want to be judged by who I am and the leadership that I bring.”

Gore’s tenure was marked by a cloud of other scandals in addition to a high jail mortality rate. He staunchly defended a sheriff’s captain who was investigated for illegal gun sales and later sent to prison. Under Gore, multiple deputies were convicted of sexual misconduct; one of them, Richard Fischer, was also involved in the suffocation death of a young father whose family won an $85 million jury verdict in March. Another deputy, Jaylen Fleer, pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting four underage girls. Last October, a jury found deputy Earle Yamamoto guilty of rape and child molestation. And, last fall, Gore was featured in a controversial video that claimed a deputy had overdosed on fentanyl after touching the drug—something that experts say is impossible. 

Martinez, who changed her voter registration from Republican to Democrat last year, has many high-profile Democratic supporters in her corner but failed to win the support of the San Diego County Democratic Party. 

Instead, the local Democratic Party decided at a December party meeting to endorse Myers. The county’s Democratic party chair, Will Rodriguez-Kennedy, described Myers as “an opportunity to reform and improve our department.”

In an interview, Myers called the current jail population “unmanageable” and said the department doesn’t have enough staffing or expertise to adequately care for the number of people with high-level health care needs who end up detained. “That’s why we’re getting the record-high deaths, because you’re not paying attention to illness, to mental health needs,” he told Bolts. “We’re seeing zero accountability when it comes to who we book into jail.” 

Despite his 35-year career with the sheriff’s department, Myers is seen as an outsider candidate. He’s openly gay and pulls no punches condemning his former employer on social media, blaming jail deaths in the county on “failed leadership.” 

Myers said the first thing he would do if elected is study the available data on jail deaths in the county and look for ways to better care for vulnerable populations in lockup. He also pointed to the sheriff’s current $1.1 billion annual budget and suggested some of that funding should be used to prevent people from landing in jail in the first place. “Instead of paying, on average, a hundred grand a year for one person in custody, let’s spend $20,000 to $30,000 a year on long-term drug treatment or mental health beds in the community run by professionals,” he said. 

Myers has also committed to making investigations into jail deaths more transparent. Currently, the department issues a press release with minimal information, and family members of people who have died in jail say the only way to find out what happened to their loved one is to file a lawsuit.

“I think that we should, as much as we can, without jeopardizing the case, be very transparent,” Myers said. “I don’t know why law enforcement can’t be more transparent with information and investigative reports with those outside of the agency.”

Another leading candidate in the sheriff’s race, John Hemmerling, a Republican, told Bolts that he would not have run if Gore had sought a fourth term as sheriff—although Hemmerling did say he’s been troubled by media reports on jail conditions. In an interview, he said he would address problems at the jail by pushing for more diversion programs. 

But Hemmerling also criticized Prop. 47, the 2014 initiative that reduced low-level theft and drug felonies to misdemeanors to keep people out of California’s overcrowded prisons, arguing that people wind up in jail because there are fewer ways to force them into treatment through the criminal legal system with programs like drug courts. “You really can’t do a carrot-and-stick model as much anymore because the way the laws are changed in California,” he said.

The Union-Tribune’s left-leaning editorial board, which has been highly critical of Gore, initially endorsed Hemmerling before yanking its endorsement in late May. The paper had praised Hemmerling, who has a military background that included overseeing a large jail in Iraq, for bringing “an outsider’s perspective” to the department. But it retracted its support after audio emerged of Hemmerling of disparaging a non-discrimination ordinance recently passed by the county’s board of supervisors that was inclusive of transgender women and telling voters he would fight against Democratic officials who had “redefined what a woman is.” While Hemmerling remains in the race, he stepped down from his position as head of the San Diego City Attorney’s Office’s criminal prosecution unit after City Attorney Mara Elliott condemned his remarks, calling them “disturbing” and not reflective of the values her office works to uphold. 

San Diego’s jails have also been accused of violating the rights of transgender women. Last November, a trans woman filed a lawsuit against the county and sheriff’s department accusing guards of  placing her in a cell with men who attacked her, fracturing her jaw. When asked about his comments about trans women, Hemmerling told Bolts via email that he believes “every individual should be treated with dignity and respect, including respect for their gender identity.” 

Problems similar to San Diego’s plague local lockups around the country, including poor medical care and inadequate monitoring of suicidal detainees, leading to preventable tragedies. Other sheriff races are on the ballot in California next week in populous counties like Alameda and Los Angeles, where dangerous jail conditions are also front-and-center. 

But Aaron Fischer, an attorney who has been involved in litigation over jails conditions in several counties, recently told The San Diego Union-Tribune that the county’s jails were among the worst he’s seen. 

San Diego jails, he said, “stand on their own in the level of mistreatment of people and the sheer awfulness of the conditions … It’s a system that has been resistant to necessary and urgent changes, even as other jurisdictions recognize the need and have begun to act.”

The post San Diego Race Will Decide New Leadership For California’s Deadliest Jail System appeared first on Bolts.

Nextdoor, the Los Angeles County sheriff’s department has a similar history and faces an impeding investigation into a secret unit accused of targeting his political enemies. Sheriff Alex Villanueva, whose deputies have been accused of harassment and organized violence against the community, faces an avalanche of challengers—eight in total—in what is arguably the nation’s most important law enforcement election this year.

The filing deadline for candidates passed earlier this month in California, filtering out dozens of counties where voters won’t get to weigh in on criminal justice policy this year. As happens nearly everywhere in the country, district attorneys and sheriffs like Barnes across the state are now certain to stay in office until 2026 because no one else is running. 

Still, millions of voters will see competitive elections for these powerful offices, which enjoy vast discretion on the rules and conditions of the local criminal legal systems. At stake are issues like whether the state continues to send people to death row—with a competitive DA race in Riverside County, one of the most aggressive jurisdictions in the entire country when it comes to seeking the death penalty—or whether minors should be prosecuted as though they are adults, a major fault line in Santa Clara County’s heated DA election.

California offers no centralized database of county-level candidates after the filing deadline, so Bolts created a cheatsheet to paint a clearer picture of what will unfold in coming months. Candidates will appear on the state’s June 7 ballot without party affiliation listed; if no one receives more than 50 percent of the vote, a runoff will be held in November between the top two candidates. 

Out of 57 counties with sheriffs’ offices on the ballot, 30 drew multiple candidates. On the prosecutor front, San Francisco will hold a recall election against DA Chesa Boudin, organized by opponents of his reforms in office. Of the 56 other counties with regular DA races, 18 counties drew multiple candidates this year—seven of which are bigger than San Francisco, including Orange County, where DA Todd Spitzer faces a new fallout from racist comments. 

In fact Orange County is the most populous in the entire nation to hold a contested DA election this year. All in all, more than 16 million Californians live in counties with contested DA races, and more than 30 million in counties with contested sheriff elections. Of course, plenty of other elections matter greatly to criminal justice and law enforcement this year, notably the statewide attorney general election that has become a major proxy battle over criminal justice reform, and plenty of local elections for mayor, city attorney, and council.

See: The full list of candidates running for sheriff and DA in California.

These elections occur against the backdrop of heated debates about the future for criminal justice reform in California. The state has taken major steps away from the “tough-on-crime” consensus that sent its prisons and jails ballooning over the past decades, often through changes that voters have directly approved. In 2014, for instance, voters adopted Prop 47, which lowered the severity of some property crimes, and they rejected rollback efforts in 2020. In recent years, progressive candidates Boudin and George Gascón also won competitive DA races in San Francisco and Los Angeles on promises to lower incarceration. Both DAs went on to champion major changes to their offices like restrictions on sentencing enhancements and cash bail, efforts to reduce long prison sentences, and a ban on seeking the death penalty. 

Boudin and Gascón have since become lightning rods for critics of decarceration, who connect their policies to the rise in homicides and to broader concerns about public safety—including fears over highly-publicized burglaries, which have become a dominant issue in San Francisco. Boudin’s recall is among the highest-profile tests of the electoral resonance of this argument in the 2022 midterms, as he is arguably the most emblematic member of the nation’s “progressive progrecutor” movement alongside Philadelphia DA Larry Krasner, who easily won re-election last year after facing similar attacks. (Gascón is not on the ballot this year. One recall drive against him has already failed, though his opponents are now trying again.)

But reform proponents are pointing out that similar concerns over public safety are playing out in counties run by vocal foes of criminal justice reform. Orange County’s Spitzer paints neighboring Los Angeles in apocalyptic terms to bolster his own standing, a familiar strategy for public officials in more suburban areas that border major cities. But Spitzer’s more progressive opponent is pointing out that murders and other crimes have also risen during the DA’s tenure.

The same dynamic holds in Riverside County, another jurisdiction on Los Angeles’s doorstep that has sentenced more people to death over the past five years than any other in the nation. 

Elsewhere, candidates are running to push criminal justice reforms much further in their counties. In Santa Clara County, public defender Sajid Khan accuses incumbent DA Jeffrey Rosen of being too punitive, promising a major overhaul if he is elected. Khan and Rosen have a long personal history, including Rosen threatening Khan with an ethics complaint during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, as Bolts reported in February. 

Orange, Riverside, and Santa Clara are California’s three most populous counties with contested DA elections this year. Six other counties with at least half-a-million-residents also host contested DA elections this year. San Francisco’s recall election has dominated national attention. In Alameda (Oakland) and Sacramento counties, incumbents who have been critical of reform are not seeking re-election (Sacramento’s DA is running for attorney general); the field to replace them offers markedly different choices, with both reform-minded candidates and others more in line with the incumbents’ politics. In Contra Costa County, reform-minded DA Diana Becton, who in 2020 joined a progressive association with Boudin and Gascón, faces one challenger. A similar dynamic is playing out in San Joaquin County. And in Ventura County, an incumbent faces a deputy DA running on his experience as a prosecutor.

Missing from the list are plenty of populous counties like San Diego, where DA Summer Stephan will face no opponent; during her last term, Stephan tried to blunt the impact of hypothetical future reforms by pushing plea deals that required defendants to waive any rights they may have to to seek re-sentencing if the legislature passes new laws. Also missing from the list of contested elections is Kern County, where the DA has sought to go further than most in deploying carceral tactics against Calfornians experiencing homelessness.

Elections for sheriff are unfolding in a similar statewide context, since sheriffs have long been prominent foes of the state’s criminal justice reforms. By and large, there is little indication that this will change after 2022. In fact, one of the more influential Democratic critics of reform is trying to switch from the legislature to the sheriff’s office: Jim Cooper, an assemblymember who is also a former sheriff’s deputy, is one of the two candidates running for sheriff in Sacramento.

But these elections may also offer rare windows into the often disastrous conditions in the local jails that sheriffs supervise. San Diego’s jail has long been the subject of investigations into a string of deaths and other major concerns, and the county has responded by targeting a chief local journalist who was holding them to account. Sheriff Bill Gore is retiring this year, and a crowded field of seven candidates is running to replace him and inherit this system. 

In Alameda County, JoAnn Walker is running on an unusual progressive ticket against Sheriff Gregory Ahern, who has also faced scrutiny for the high number of jail deaths under his watch. Walker has tied Ahern’s use of solitary confinement to a series of suicides at the jail. “How can they come out and be normal?” she asked about people held in the local lockup at a recent forum.

California has restrictive rules on who can run for sheriff, which boxes out anyone who is an outsider to law enforcement. Some reformers have sought to eliminate this barrier to more candidates, but in the meantime there remain limits on who can even try to change these offices. In 2018, Villanueva was a veteran of the Los Angeles sheriff’s department when he ran on promises to clean it up from the inside. Instead, one of his earliest decisions once he became sheriff was to rehire deputies who were fired for misconduct.

Catch up with our other primers on prosecutor and sheriff elections in 2022 on Arkansas, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Utah, as well as our national primer.

The post California’s Midterms Bring Plenty of Forks in the Road for Criminal Justice Reforms appeared first on Bolts.