Local advocates and community leaders are urging for mental health alternatives after the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors voted to move forward with a $390 million jail in a Jan. 25 meeting.
The proposed jail will be located at the previous location of Main Jail South, at 885 N. San Pedro St., according to the Santa Clara County Facilities and Fleet Department website.
Tomara Hall, race equity and community safety representative for the Reimagining Public Safety Committee of San Jose, said community members against the jail felt “at a loss.”
“There were many people who put a lot of time and effort, and spoke with the various elected officials in the county and felt that things would swing the way of what the community wanted, what system-impacted folks needed,” she said. “When that vote failed it was disenchanting.”
The 500-bed jail is intended to “fulfill the need for additional medium to high-medium security,” and address the need for inmate programs including mental health services, special management housing beds, and re-entry programs for inmates preparing to be released from custody, according to the facilities website.
MacKenzie Owens, global studies senior and member of the San Jose State Students Against Mass Incarceration, said she believes a new jail will not address systemic issues.
“If there aren’t enough prisoners in there and enough incarcerated folks in there, they’re going to try and fill it,” she said. “It’s just not fair to the community, especially marginalized groups.”
The jail was approved in a 3-2 vote, with District 2 Supervisor Cindy Chavez and District 4 Supervisor Susan Ellenberg voting against the facility’s construction.
Ellenberg presented a referral during the supervisors’ meeting rejecting the jail’s construction and proposed more comprehensive behavioral health care and expanding alternatives to pretrial incarceration, according to a Jan. 24 statement.
The referral comes after Ellenberg and District 3 supervisor Otto Lee’s Jan. 11 referral, which received a unanimous board vote, declaring mental health and substance abuse a public health crisis in the county.
Alternatives to incarceration including permanent supportive housing, addiction recovery programs, psychiatric treatment, and mental health rehabilitation centers are programs “critical” to addressing public health and safety matters, Ellenberg stated in her Jan. 24 referral.
Approximately 80% of people held in Santa Clara County jails are held pre-trial, according to the referral.
Kiana Simmons, president of local advocacy group Human Empowerment Radical Optimism (HERO) Tent, said because a majority of those in county jails are held at pre-trial, incarcerating those individuals violates their due process rights.
“If we have more [mental health] services, more prevention services that can get in between people on the street, people suffering from substance abuse issues and the jail, then that would prevent people from going to jail,” she said in a phone interview.
Though Ellenberg’s efforts to reject the jail didn’t succeed in the Jan. 25 supervisors meeting, a portion of her referral passed. The referral will allow the county to consider options to build a new mental health facility and expand funding for existing mental health services and drug abuse care infrastructure, according to a Jan. 25 Mercury News article.
Tomara Hall said lawmakers should prioritize decarceration efforts and “moving forward with more empathy” for marginalized communities.
“We believe in the mental health of these folks, and being locked up is not going to help,” she said. “It’s only going to really add to the trauma.”
