An hour-long program, shot over five days inside San Francisco Jail No. 3, offers a rare tour inside the city’s largest jail. The guide: Sheriff Paul Miyamoto and his deputies.
Aired Aug. 17 on the Discovery Channel among shows like “Naked and Afraid” and “Deadliest Catch,” the “120 Hours Behind Bars” series, produced by Lucky 8, lives somewhere between documentary and reality TV.
The series bills itself as “an unfiltered look inside the toughest U.S. jails” and was filmed over five days earlier this summer with permission from the San Francisco Sheriff’s Office. Tara Moriarity, spokesperson for the sheriff’s office, wrote that “120 Hours Behind Bars gave the public a valuable and unusually transparent look inside our operations.” She said the sheriff’s department was permitted to review the episode prior to its release but that they made no editorial decisions.
The public defender’s office, on the other hand, questioned whether the sheriff’s office’s “zeal to manufacture positive press” had impacted the filmmaking process. Still, the public defender’s office commended the show for exposing “the jail’s inhumane conditions, including the vast majority of more than 1,100 people confined to cramped cells for 23 hours a day with no access to sunlight or fresh air” — in response, Moriarty said she “strongly disagrees with any characterization of our jails as inhumane based on the generalization of a one-hour edited television show.”
So what can a discerning viewer take away from 60 minutes of “120 Hours”?
Conditions in San Francisco jails have been well documented. In the past year Mission Local detailed reports of pervasive “vomit, spit, and shit” inside city jails, the sheriff’s department has said it is short at least a hundred staff and 20 women alleged they were strip-searched en masse — and filmed — by deputies; they have since sued. The city’s civil grand jury in June reported that jails are at a “breaking point.”
But video is different. Rather than reading about the the jail through a journalist intermediary, you can hear directly from a person who’s locked up — assuming they can speak freely.
While two of the incarcerated people interviewed were pre-selected by the sheriff’s department, the majority asked to be interviewed, Moriarity wrote in a July 8 email to the public defender’s office.
The public defender’s office responded that those included in the documentary should have been given the “opportunity to consult with counsel before participating in media interviews,” since the interviews could have adverse effects on ongoing cases.
“Our concern is that Lucky 8 obtained extraordinary access to interview pretrial detainees inside the San Francisco County Jail through a process that appears to have bypassed a fundamental safeguard,” the public defender’s office wrote to the production company that same week.
Lucky 8 did not respond to Mission Local’s request for comment.
Most scenes in the episode are told from the perspective of sheriff’s deputies or narrated by an unidentified voice.
In one incident, the narrator describes the deputies’ decision to release pepper spray inside a cell where someone has been locked in solitary confinement for 24 hours. Ultimately the deputies conclude that they have no other choice because the man — who one deputy says is undergoing psychosis — refuses to come to the door and be cuffed.
“After failing to comply, an inmate is forcibly removed from the safety cell following a 24-hour hold,” the narrator explains, as deputies drag the man out of the cell, coughing, with his shoulder contorted behind his back.
Halfway through the episode, the focus turns to the San Francisco jail system’s crown jewel, the “Annex” — a facility only a few hundred feet away, where a smaller number of people are housed in open pods instead of cells and have access to outdoor exercise and programming, including pickleball courts and educational opportunities.
That is a marked contrast to County Jail No. 3’s main building, where the majority of people are locked in their cells for 22 hours a day and don’t have access to any outdoor space.
“Being behind them walls in that main facility, you don’t want to be up there. One hour in the morning. One hour at night. And you gotta fight for a phone, fight for the shower,” John Smith says to the camera. Smith, who was being held at the Annex, had spent time in the main facility as well.
Smith describes mornings at the Annex as “so peaceful,” sipping his coffee outside.
“Down here you got freedom,” he says. Later, deputies are shown ripping through Smith’s possessions, as they search the Annex for drugs.
Moriarty acknowledged the differences, advocating for more money for the jails to improve facilities. She wrote that the differences between the two sites “underscore an issue the Sheriff’s Office has discussed for years: physical infrastructure matters.”
For now, the contrast between the main jail and the Annex serves as a carrot that deputies can use to incentivize good behavior.
“A little bit of fresh air? A little bit of sunshine?” a deputy tells someone being moved to the Annex at the end of the film. “You’ll be getting more of that, so long as you play by the rules.”
“The public defender’s office, on the other hand, questioned whether the sheriff’s office’s “zeal to manufacture positive press” had impacted the filmmaking process”
Not sure this is any business of the public defender’s office, whose job is to represent criminals in court, not nursemaid them in jail.