How Much Does a Night in Santa Barbara’s Hoosegow Cost? 

A night stay at the county jail costs the county $322. That’s one of the many fun facts the county supervisors were drenched with this Tuesday morning. That’s a little more than the Hilton Hotel charges and a little less than the Kimpton’s Canary. By contrast, a night at the county Psychiatric Health Facility (PHF) — better known as the “Puff Unit” — goes for about $2,600 a night. For what it’s worth, that’s slightly more than the room rate for the San Ysidro Ranch, though admittedly these are off-season rates.

All this was relevant because the supervisors were conducting a collective brain dump and deep dive into how the county’s criminal justice partners — the Sheriff, the District Attorney, County Probation, the Public Defender, and Behavioral Wellness — can keep mentally ill people out of jail (and the criminal justice system in general) and get them into treatment instead. This is part of a longstanding but slow-moving initiative that begins at the very top with County Executive Officer Mona Miyasato and has the unanimous support of all five county supervisors, though there’s still plenty of room for disagreement over key details. 

Part of the problem has been the dearth of reliable data upon which key decisions — how not to put the public at risk by letting dangerous predators out — rely. To help ferret out the facts, the county hired an economist named Michael Wilson, who specializes in probing the politically polarizing interstices of criminal justice reform. 

This was the second time Wilson deluged the supervisors with data and policy recommendations. Two years ago, he informed them that the jail population could be safely reduced to about 600 inmates a month if all the criminal justice partners embraced a handful of policy changes when it came to diverting mentally ill people. (Before COVID, the jail’s average daily population hovered at 1,000.) This Tuesday, he upped that number to 750, explaining that the Department of Finance has since revised the county’s population projections, meaning Santa Barbara can expect a 5.6 percent increase in the number of people likely to go to jail in the next 10 years. 

That also happens to be roughly the same number of people who’ve been in jail at any given time since COVID was declared no longer an emergency. Part of Wilson’s challenge, he explained, was lack of data that allowed him to track the number of mentally ill people inside the county jail with the level of precision he said was necessary. He did disclose that 13 percent of the inmates — about 100 — were seriously mentally ill enough to require specialty mental health care. Fifty-nine percent, he said, qualified for placement on a mental health caseload.

A cadre of health advocates long birddogging the issue — all wearing red scarves — highlighted the amount of money spent by the county on incarceration instead of treatment. Supervisor Steve Lavagnino noted that the only thing more expensive than the jail to operate was the county PHF. There are many reasons to pursue criminal justice reform, Lavagnino stated, but cost savings wasn’t one of them. 

Compared to prior meetings on the subject, the tone was much less confrontational and territorial. The criminal justice partners were repeatedly praised for “rowing in the same direction.” District Attorney John Savrnoch explained there’d been a fundamental shift among his deputies. Before, he said, they’d felt forced to justify referring anyone to any of the many diversion options; now, he said, his deputies must justify not availing themselves of these options. 

Sheriff Bill Brown sought to disabuse the supervisors of any false optimism that the population of the county jail — which is his domain — can be kept as low as some would like the supervisors to believe. All law enforcement agencies have been serious understaffed for some time, he pointed out, some agencies with vacancy rates as high as 25 percent. When they got properly staffed, he predicted, there would be a lot more crimes solved, a lot more arrests, and a lot more bookings. 

He argued that medically based drug and alcohol treatment programs — administered in the jail — were the single best program for reducing recidivism the supervisors could invest in. The medication, he acknowledged, was extremely expensive, running $1,900 for a 30-day injection. As the supervisor make multimillion-dollar decisions in the months to come regarding key jail infrastructure conundrums, Brown stressed, they should allow room for growth. 

Wilson, the economist hired by the county, stressed that he’d made no specific claims regarding how low the jail population could be safely maintained, explaining that many of the criminal reforms long envisioned and supported by the criminal justice partners were either still on the drawing board or only recently off. He lacked the data to make reliable projections as to how many prisoners could be diverted but expressed confidence it would be something. 

In the meantime, the supervisors heard how 85 percent of the jail population had not yet been convicted of any crime, that one-third were facing criminal charges for the first time, that another third had been booked one to five times, and that 18 percent had been booked more than 10 times. By that point, the supervisors had grown water-logged by the ingestion of too much data without enough clarity. They accepted Wilson’s report and praised the criminal justice partners, yet again, for collaborating so well.