There is a story of San Francisco’s jails, but it’s not the jail story you’ve come to know. This is not “The Shawshank Redemption,” or “The Longest Yard,” or “Escape from Alcatraz,” or “Cool Hand Luke,” with cruel wardens and sadistic guards and brutal inmate gangs and escaping to freedom through 500 yards of shit-smelling foulness you can’t imagine, or maybe you just don’t want to.
Sadly, rivers of unimaginable sewage does, indeed, describe the story of a prior iteration of San Francisco’s jails. But not now.
The story now, if you can believe it, is messier. And more complicated. To wit: We have learned that behind closed doors, and in staff meetings, Sheriff’s Department employees admit that their most effective spokesman of late has been a convicted murderer.
“It’s a new breed of inmate in here,” that inmate, 47-year-old Zuri Wilson, told Mission Local last month. “They don’t respect anything. They are mentally unwell. Most of them are drug addicts. It’s total chaos.”
Wilson has been both in San Francisco jails and state prisons since first being convicted in 2013 for laying in wait and shooting Shawntae Otis to death. He described the sheriff’s deputies guarding him in earlier years as “racist cowboys,” but says that’s no longer the case.
“It’s a new kind of staff,” he said. “People from the same cultural backgrounds as us: Asian, Black, Mexican. They are not racist. … The staff are more humane than they were even five or 10 years ago; I don’t blame them for anything going on here. They just don’t know how to deal with this type of person.”
In the weeks preceding our article about Wilson, San Francisco’s jails repeatedly went into lockdown mode following a series of confrontations in which inmates attacked, bit, or beat deputies. A week after our article, Sheriff’s Department employees said in public what Wilson had told us in private regarding chaotic conditions due to far fewer deputies working in the jails as the jail population is surging with a high percentage of mentally ill, drug-addicted inmates.
Mission Local has learned that, last week, three deputies were briefly hospitalized after restraining an inmate who’d earlier jabbed at them with a broom.
“We knew that we had a workforce crisis in the sheriff’s office; we’ve known this for so long,” bemoaned Supervisor Hillary Ronen at a three-hour hearing on May 14. “We knew that this effort to arrest not only dealers but drug users was going to lead to a much larger jail population of very sick people. … So my No. 1 question is, what was the plan?”
Following that lengthy hearing, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a strongly worded op-ed that the surge in jail violence was “entirely predictable … yet there’s little political will to act.”
That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. Rather: The jail conditions Mission Local has, for years, documented — chaos, a surge in violence, more drug-addicted and mentally ill inmates, severe staffing shortages, cutbacks in programming and inmates languishing in their cells and doing drugs — is the plan.
Prison records indicate that, on May 10, Zuri Wilson was transferred from San Francisco County Jail to California State Prison, Solano in Vacaville. This was what he wanted: He much preferred the order of a state prison, brutally maintained by an unwritten code among inmates, than the “chaos” of San Francisco’s jails.
The conditions he no longer has to deal with came as no surprise to him. Wilson and your humble narrator have been communicating on and off since 2022, and he long foresaw the jail crisis that would be caused by ramped-up arrests of the mentally ill, drug-users and mentally ill drug-users. “I told you the new policies the city was enacting would put all the people in the Tenderloin in jail,” he said in May. “They hadn’t bathed for months in the streets, and they ain’t bathing here.”
A longtime deputy said they’ve never seen so many inmates detoxing; a former jail worker said they often wore a mask not just to prevent the spread of disease but to temper the smell of unwashed men. “It looks like a mini-Tenderloin in there,” they said.
So, again: This is the plan.
And that has trickle-down effects. Sixteen inmates on Friday received their diplomas in a ceremony at County Jail No. 3 in San Bruno. This is legitimately great news. But what’s less great is that 16 is a small number, a fraction of the number of diplomas handed out in prior years. And Five Keys Charter School CEO Steve Good tells Mission Local that there could have been many more, if only there were enough deputies to supervise jail classrooms.
With more deputies, he could hire more teachers. Good thinks Five Keys could get 100 more students in its programs if the deputies were properly staffed: “We can’t staff up until they staff up.”
The demand for in-jail education, he says, is always there. The demand to work as a deputy in San Francisco jails, however, isn’t. In this city, it often takes a year to hire a deputy sheriff — and that’s a deputy sheriff who is already academy-trained. That’s more than twice as long as it often took a decade ago, and far, far longer than surrounding jurisdictions. Maddeningly, in the depths of a staffing crisis, qualified deputies who want to work here are taking other jobs because San Francisco can’t get back to them fast enough.
Did city officials explicitly desire for undermanned deputies to be set upon by a growing inmate population, a disproportionate number of whom are struggling with drug-use and mental illness issues? Did they want the depletion of deputies to lead to a commensurate depletion of programming for inmates? Did they want inmates deprived of programming that could turn their lives around?
No, not explicitly. But, here’s the thing: This was the inevitable outcome of the city’s actions and priorities and, clearly, the city did not care. You cannot beef up emphasis on arresting drug users and beef up every vestige of public safety — except the jails that house inmates and the deputies who guard them — and expect anything else.
So this, de-facto, is the plan. Because the city does not care. There is no political price to pay for allowing, even enabling, chaotic conditions in the jails.
And that is because, by and large, San Franciscans do not care about what goes on in the jails.
It was Fyodor Dostoevsky who said a society can be judged by its prisons. Well, he sure nailed San Francisco: We are aspirational, but superficial. This city prides itself on its liberalism, but remains deeply susceptible to cheap populism and simplistic and reactive concepts of justice.
San Francisco righteously turned down $80 million in state money to build a new jail facility in 2016. Building jails, our Board of Supervisors decried, is reactive. And yet, we’re still tossing people into jails, more and more of them every day. But now, they’re sent to inadequate facilities with inadequate staffing.
It was Alexis de Toqueville who noted that “a false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.”
Well, he had San Francisco’s number, too.
There is, again, no political price to pay regarding what transpires within our jails. The well-being of our inmates — and, it would seem, those who work alongside them — is far down this city’s priority list.
It shouldn’t be. One needn’t be a bleeding heart to desire better. Even a wholly self-interested person should care about this.
“Unless they get life without parole, the people in jail are all coming back. They are coming back, to your neighborhood,” says former Assistant Sheriff Michael Marcum, a department employee from 1973 to 2012.
“It’s your choice: Do you want them coming back after having found some dignity for the first time in their lives with a high school and college diploma, or clean for 60 days or learning how to be a parent and getting their child back from the foster system?”
The alternative, he says, is “getting started in violence and chaos and being warehoused, and that is what they will look for when they get to prison. And they will find it.”
Jail inmates, Marcum continues, “are not some others or aliens. They are part of the community. They are part of San Francisco.”
This is something too many San Franciscans just can’t imagine. Or maybe we just don’t want to.
Instead of hospitalizing those with psychotic disorders because God forbid their civil rights will be nullified better to discharge them from the ER to the street and tell their families to “hope he gets arrested” This is policy not only of the current DA but of SF Department of Health.
We scream about the filth and the degradation we walk through on our way downtown in the Tenderloin (Hastings School of Law even filed a lawsuit demanding something be done about what is going on right outside their door) but we don’t really want a solution to this Dante’s ninth circle of hell, we want it out of our sight. Not understanding that what the City has done in response to our pressure has only guaranteed that it will continue and even get worse. I worked in one of the jail units at SFGH and inmate/patients there would beg to take a shower but no deputy was available to open the door to the shower and supervise.
Staffing is what it’s all about but the higher ups refuse to “get” that and make no effort to make the job more attractive. Vacations and other time off denied because there’s nobody to cover the absences. Endless negative feedback loop.
“we don’t really want a solution to this Dante’s ninth circle of hell, we want it out of our sight”
I don’t buy that. The solution is multifaceted, but the first necessary step is making it much, much easier to mandate and enforce treatment for people struggling with severe mental illness and drug addiction. Lots of people support this policy but the loudest opposition comes from the so-called homeless advocates. Go figure.
“the first necessary step is making it much, much easier to mandate and enforce treatment for people struggling with severe mental illness and drug addiction”
Except that people who actually know what they’re talking about have been saying, clearly and consistently, for decades, that that approach DOES NOT WORK. Funny how you don’t listen.
Well, perhaps Aaron Peskin or Ahsha Safai will win and continue implementing the homeless advocates’ plan of letting severely mentally ill and drug-addicted people live in tents in tourist areas indefinitely, in the hopes they decide for themselves to accept treatment from city health staffers. Because that’s working so well for them and for our city’s economy. We can also let the all-night drug market at 7th and Market keep running indefinitely while we’re at it.
I suppose it’s working well for the homeless so-called advocates who get Big Money SF $$$ to pretend they are making an impact.
It doesn’t have to be either of the extremes being discussed.
There’s a common sense solution that no one has reached yet.
Funnier who you consider “the exact people who know what they’re talking about.”
it’s a fact that prolonged methamphetamine and fentanyl use leads to profound, permanent brain damage. Most of these people even with intense mental health services will not be fit to Live independently or even in the general population. Yes we need mental institutions and yes these establishments can be humane.
The Ninth Circle is probably too sophisticated for SF politicos. The 8th circle for fraud is the most likely, as almost everything we witness today from City Hall and the campaign trail (as ML has reported) is fraud. There is a particular circle within the 8th circle for this who through fraud abuse public trust. As Dante points out abuse of public position replaces trust with cynicism, which we see here and nationally (Hello Donald). Though Trump was rightly convicted for fraud, the bigger fraudsters this time around are the billionaires behind Big Money SF. They call themselves “moderate” which enough for Minos to drop them in the lowest part of the 8th circle, where liars covered with scabies and excrement, hurl insults at each other. Read Inferno Canto 30; kind of reads like a preview of the upcoming Biden Trump “debate”
And then there are those inmates who are awaiting trials in this dangerous and chaotic conditions and technically, they’re innocent until proven guilty. Our county jail is bursting with overcrowded conditions and those that have not seen their day in court have to endure this while our DA is busy trying people who have already been tried, convicted, and sentenced to jail. Such was the case with David de Pape, the guy who attacked Nancy Peolosi’s husband and was already tried, convicted, and sentenced to 30 years in prison in a Federal court. Nevertheless, the SF DA was trying him again in a state court.
I was part of that jury selection process and for days, I had to endure the farce we call our criminal justice system. The DA was screening the potential jurors by repeatedly asking whether or not someone who is mentally ill and commits a crime deserves punishment. And of course, everyone in the jury box was nodding “yes” in response. The problem is us. Aside from the fact that trying Mr. de Pape for a second time is a waste of tax payers dollars particularly at a time when accused criminals are rotting in our overcrowded jails awaiting trial, the problem is with our fellow San Franciscans who believe in punishment instead of treatment for mentally ill. Such is the state of our city and our people.
Given that we can’t institutionalize them or force them into rehab, removal from society is our only tool. Or did you think the community would just “be cool” about violent addicts living on our streets?
Did you read the article Antonio?
Antonio, what do you mean by “removal from society”? Be specific.
“Removal from society” is like time out for grown ups. Hope that helps!
No, Antonio, it doesn’t help. I said “be specific.” That’s a word you do know.
please elaborate
As one who speaks from experience, a fair portion of the inmates would stop their criminal activities if, when released, they had housing. Some of the criminal activity is directly related to experiencing homelessness. Finding stable housing for inmates prior to release is one way to break the cycle of recidivism
Sean,
It’s abject poverty at the root that’s the main cause.
Universal Basic Income will go a long way toward solving the thing.
A young and black Stockton Mayor tried it with a grand a month and crime dived.
A few hundred in the study group and haters voted him out.
Same pressures up in Oregon which virtually Decriminalized Drugs and had to backtrack because pressure on the Reform Politicians from haters never stops.
Same story in Portugal.
SF needs to try a Pilot UBI Program.
And, Decriminalize Drugs.
h.
“They don’t respect anything. They are mentally unwell. Most of them are drug addicts. It’s total chaos.”
All the programs and treatment in the world will not make this subpopulation safe for release.
Wasn’t like 1/2 of 2018’s Prop C supposed to fund substance and psych treatment capacity?
Why has Breed refused to spend those hundreds of millions of dollars on psych and substance treatment which, while expensive, is a bargain compared to incarceration?
Rehabilitation is key! The city’s plan sucks! They’re arresting these people for a reason and clearly they have addictions and their addiction led to severe mental illness. Now they’re in jail! Yay! Don’t get too excited the city just gave them a place to sleep and eat! If there is no reform there’s no change! If there’s no change then what you have are people who can’t wait to get out and do the same thing on the same streets and what was the arrest for? Not saying the jails are a recovery center but they need some kind of structure and education for the brain that has obviously been broken by the addiction! ! There should be a mandated routine chow, shower and some type of class or program to get the brain stimulated. I know this sounds crazy but what happens when they’re released and back on the streets? The same damn thing. Or hey how about send them back to their state or city where they came from? That’s an idea. This city used to be beautiful and with history unimaginable. Now whatever you do don’t go to San Francisco unless you want to get robbed or beaten or your car broken into. Give me a break!
Go away.
A rotten, fetid, putrid and tragic mess brought to us by the Queen of Dysfunction and Knee Jerkery: London Breed and her installed and appointed DA Crooked Brooke Jenkins.
A good start would be to ensure drugs don’t flow into the prison system. Even if there was more funding for staffing, does anybody really think inmates will get a high school diploma while high out of their minds? Even if jail would be nothing but a grim detox camp, that would already dramatically improve the chances of convicts not immediately falling back to old habits once released.
Yeah,
Jails are big business and getting bigger.
Privatizing the incarcerated has become a multi-billion dollar corporate industry and like all corporations they must grow.
All of this is on the Mayor for ordering the arrest of the customers (black ones anyway) as well as the dealers and she’s been around crime and prisons and drugs her entire life same as me and knew what would happen.
But, it’s an Election Year and she wants to look tough on crime to the Voters.
Sadly, the Revenge Approach only makes things worse.
Says this old retired Reform School teacher.
h.
The plan should be to build a new jail. A jail like the old San Buno jail it had windows 2 man cells long tiers and a yard in the back. Also had 2 big pods.
the jail is the new warehouse for those city residents whose behavior has pissed off the well-bred class of our leaders since the tenderloin containment policy became unmanageable when they started appearing in other parts of the city and affecting the fortunes of the elite.
remember your history: the vigilantes (who became the sfpd) were formed to protect the wealthy and their fortunes from the disparaging behavior of a few.
It’s a simple path towards a solution: elect a new DA and a new Mayor.
Joe, what would you do instead?
The point of having a jail is to protect law abiding citizens from the people in jail.
Better to have these crazy junkies behind bars than harassing the rest of us.
I think the column is pretty clear that we’re the ones who have chosen to overcrowd a jail without the adequate staffing and resources, including drug treatment, mental health care, and education programming, to keep people safe and do more than temporarily warehouse the “crazy junkies” you decry. Just about everyone in the jail is getting released at some point, and it does nothing to protect me or you to just cycle people in and out of jail.
We are protected while they are in jail.
I know that progressives have difficulty holding more than one article in their heads at a time. Perhaps you should look up the city’s budget deficit. We don’t have an unlimited pot of gold to spend on the jail. We’re busy handing it over to Jennifer Friedenbach.
I’d like to see our jail be more humane, have better treatments and education, etc. etc. etc. Agreed. Where does the money come from? It’s just not that simple.
We also have a tremendous shortage of police on the street, and that’s where our recruitment efforts should be.
Thanks, Ashley, for being part of the problem.
You mean because I’m sensible and I vote that way?
Y’all progressives did such a great job of running the city. If the current state of affairs is your idea of the “solution,” then it’s an honor to be disparaged by you.
Ashley really hates those strawmen “progressives” screaming in her Fox News head.
It’s a matter of priorities.
Maybe you should ask yourself if you’ve read the article, which he literally points out the solutions and why we should do it throughout the article.
Like….funding staff so education experts can do their job, fixing staff time to hire, etc.
Actually, even your other statements are already answered by the article.
If people read.
That $80 million they turned down would come in handy now.
San Francisco became a magnet for drug tourism and all the problems that come with it. At long last we seem to be moving past the “downtown is for drug users” phase of city politics, but it is going to take years to recover. The jails are now just one of many stakeholders that are suffering and will continue to suffer for the near future as a result of city leaders letting the situation get so out of control.
The problem with your statement is that many people housed here have not been convicted of a crime.
these addicts are residents of our city. like so many others, you see them as outsiders. to ask to send them back where they came from is a racist trope based in fear; aka ‘xenophobia’.