San Francisco announced the reopening of a 300-bed annex of its largest jail in San Bruno on Friday, in response to increasing arrests and a growing jail population.
San Francisco’s total jail population, as of Friday morning, is 1,105 — the highest since early 2020. Last October, the jail population sat at 835, but has been steadily increasing over the past year, particularly in the past several months as the city cracks down on drug dealing and street crime.
“Part of the uptick in the current jail population can be attributed to people with multiple court cases being held to answer on arrests and charges,” said Sheriff Paul Miyamoto in a statement.
The annex has two of its six dorms ready for immediate use, the Sheriff’s Office announced on Friday. The city’s jail in San Bruno houses up to 768 inmates, and the courthouse adjacent to the Seventh Street jail can house another 392, for a total maximum capacity of 1,160.
The jail within the 850 Bryant St. courthouse, which could house about 400 incarcerated people, was shuttered in 2020.
“We’re running out of space,” said Deputy Sheriff’s Association president Ken Lomba, who said the annex had been retrofitted and remodeled while it has been closed. “If they do increase the amount of arrests … the annex is gonna get filled next. And then what?”
Lomba said that even the opening of the small annex would complicate matters for an understaffed sheriff’s department, which he said is dealing with jail population levels that are becoming “unsafe.”
Last year, Mission Local reported on inmates languishing in jails, with programming largely nixed and those incarcerated taking drugs while behind bars.
Just this month, a judge ruled that San Francisco was indeed violating inmates’ constitutional rights by depriving them of sunlight, and mandated that the city allow inmates access to at least 15 minutes of direct sunlight every day.
“They’re barely going to have enough deputies to open up a pod to handle the overflow,” Lomba said. The annex, he said, was far larger — it could perhaps hold another 300 inmates.
In addition to staffing the jail, he said, transporting inmates from San Bruno to San Francisco for court hearings would require additional resources. He said a new jail within San Francisco city limits would be a better solution, with space for drug rehabilitation and extra beds for fluctuations in jail population.
“A lot of it is a political ideology, where the politicians — or a politician — is too afraid to build a new, modern facility in San Francisco,” Lomba said. “And that’s what we need.”
