Grand Jury Provides Kaleidoscopic Snapshot of Santa Barbara County’s Detention Facilities

“Outdated, small, and crowded.” Warm and muggy, too. These are just some of the many uncomfortable adjectives used by the Santa Barbara Grand Jury to describe the holding cell underneath the County Courthouse. And that’s just with 33 inmates in a facility built to accommodate 42. Individual cells there are notably small, with ceilings seven feet high and 32 by 32 inches of space. Very small metal chairs in the corner are also provided.

“There needs to be a major overhaul of the facility, preferably an expansion in every aspect of the operation. Everything needs to be upgraded,” the Grand Jury concluded. “But first and foremost, the air circulation must be improved.”

This was one of the many quick-and-telling snapshots provided in this year’s Grand Jury report detailing conditions in Santa Barbara’s 16 detention facilities.

The Main Jail on Calle Real is really a hodgepodge of three individual units built at different times — 1971, 1990, and 2006 — but never woven into a cohesive integrated whole. Stemming from these “Franken-jail” origins are notoriously bad sight lines that require significantly more personnel for a host of reasons, such as escorting prisoners to and from medical appointments.

The three housing units of the Main Jail require a minimum of 19 correctional deputies per shift, the Grand Jury reported, but typically there are only 10 to 14. As a result, deputies are forced to work 12-hour-long, mandatory-overtime shifts, which, coupled with long commutes required by high housing costs, has led to high turnover and low retention rates. Some deputies have such long commutes, the Grand Jury discovered, that they sleep between shifts in a former medium-security facility located in the Main Jail.

Heating infrastructure in several of the wings has become so problematic, the Grand Jury noted, that rather than fix the problem, sweaters are distributed to inmates.

The cost of incarcerating an inmate overnight at the Main Jail is $344, as compared to the $280 a night it costs at the new Northern Branch Jail near Santa Maria, which the Grand Jury praised as a model of design and efficiency and found to be “clean, bright, and quiet with a well-maintained physical plant.”

The Grand Jury seemed troubled by the lack of medical personnel assigned to the Santa Maria Courthouse but noted that there have been no suicides, attempted suicides, deaths from other causes, or escapes since its last inspection. (Structural changes have just been initiated on the Main Jail to make suicide by hanging — or throwing oneself over the second-story railing — more difficult, the Grand Jury reported.)

A year ago, construction of New Cuyama’s new holding facility was completed, though with one major glitch. The holding cell door swings inside the cell instead of out as state guidelines mandate, so the cell has not been used since construction concluded. If an arrest is made by deputies, arrestees are held either in the deputy’s car or sent to the Northern Branch Jail.

Last but not least, the Grand Jury discovered that food was a big problem at Santa Maria’s juvenile facility — described as clean and well-maintained — because it’s hard to find caterers willing or able to meet the facility’s seven-day-a-week demand cycle. Although the food served was “universally disliked by all the residents,” the Grand Jury found, the servings were also too small. “It not only provides less food than adolescents need and want, but also the food is sometimes found to be unpalatable to adolescent taste buds.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the size of the individual holding cells at the Santa Barbara County Courthouse. They are seven feet high and 32 by 32 inches of space, not 32 square inches.