Frustrated with the pace of reforms inside San Diego County jails, where record numbers of people have died in recent years, state Sen. Toni Atkins is introducing a bill that would grant county supervisors authority to assume control of local detention facilities.
Atkins, the San Diego Democrat who is in her final two years as Senate president, said the legislation — if signed into law — would give local officials leverage over sheriffs who are unable or unwilling to improve practices and prevent people from dying behind bars.
The bill, which is scheduled to be published Thursday, would also require sheriffs across California to release internal records related to in-custody deaths.
Additionally, it would expand the mission of the Board of State and Community Corrections, the agency responsible for overseeing county jails and juvenile detention systems, to promote more oversight and to improve inspection practices.
“I don’t think this is going to be an easy lift,” Atkins said in an interview Wednesday. “I’m the Pro Tem, but that only goes so far — but I do think we’ve had a sea change in how we look at these things in society.
“This would have been dead on arrival in the past; that’s not true now,” she said. “A lot of this is long overdue.”
Atkins said reforming county jails has become a critical issue confronting local officials, who generally have little say over elected sheriffs beyond approving their budgets.
She called the idea of permitting county supervisors to run jails a necessary fix to a system that has allowed sheriffs to avoid making improvements that would better protect people in their custody.
Atkins singled out San Diego in the wake of a state audit last year that identified 185 jail deaths between 2006 and 2020. She also credited The San Diego Union-Tribune for its multiyear effort to showcase the high death rate in San Diego County jails.
The county has maintained the highest jail mortality rate among California’s largest counties for years — deaths that have anguished families and cost taxpayers millions of dollars in legal settlements.
Eighteen people died in San Diego County jails in 2021, and 20 more died in local custody last year, including one man who was formally released hours before dying in a nearby hospital.
“The impetus is because of San Diego, but this is a statewide issue,” Atkins said. “There were 18 deaths in Riverside jails last year and seven in Los Angeles so far this year. This is not just a San Diego problem. We have been the tip of the spear.”
Atkins said she met with newly elected Sheriff Kelly Martinez, and while she is convinced the sheriff is committed to making necessary improvements, it was clear to her that the Board of Supervisors could use more help in pushing the department toward reforms.
“I would call this a local control option,” she said. “Counties typically like local control. It’s not a mandate that they have to do. It’s a tool in their tool box.”
The legislation, Senate Bill 519, is the latest attempt to reform the San Diego Sheriff’s Department, and other county sheriffs’ agencies, through the statehouse.
Last year, a bill by Assemblymember Akilah Weber that would have enhanced mental-health screenings during the booking process and added behavioral health professionals to the Board of State and Community Corrections was vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom.
In his veto message last fall, Newsom said adding two more seats to the 13-member board was unnecessary and “could impede its ability to timely carry out its mission.”
Earlier this year, Weber re-introduced that bill.
But the Atkins legislation goes much further by granting direct oversight of local jails to county supervisors if they see fit.
Napa County already has a jail system managed by an appointee of county supervisors, having ed authority for jails from the elected sheriff to a supervisor-appointed director in the 1970s.
But in the early 1990s, new legislation complicated the process for other counties. The Atkins bill would eliminate conflicting language in state law.
Martinez pledged during her campaign for sheriff last year to release internal findings related to jail deaths but reversed course once she was elected.
Instead, the department this year began issuing summaries of fatalities — usually single-page reports that read like press releases and withhold critical details. State auditors, the civilian review board, activists and others have sharply criticized Martinez for not fulfilling her pledge.
Martinez said Wednesday that she met with Atkins recently to discuss ways to improve the criminal justice system locally — and progress the department has made in reducing deaths in San Diego County jails.
The sheriff said she is working to make the people in her custody safer, but the facilities are old and staffing presents an ongoing challenge.
Martinez said she does not the idea of moving jail operations to a separate board-appointed department, however.
“I believe that any decisions regarding jail management should be made by individuals who have significant experience in doing that work,” the sheriff said in a statement Wednesday.
“Many of the duties of the jailer overlap with those of the courts, prisons, District Attorney, Public Defender, Probation, other law enforcement entities and justice partners,” she said. “Separating functions and leadership of the Sheriff’s Department could jeopardize the efficiency and efficacy of those operations.”
Nora Vargas, the San Diego County Board of Supervisors chair who would be responsible for creating any corrections and rehabilitation department independent of the Sheriff’s Department, did not respond to questions Wednesday.
But local activists welcomed the prospect of taking responsibility for local jails away from county sheriffs.
“This bill would be a great legislative tool towards implementation of an independent oversight of jail operations,” said Yusef Miller of the North County Equity and Justice Coalition, a community group that has been fighting for changes to jails in San Diego for years.
Miller said the only way to force changes inside sheriff’s departments is to organize a recall, which is an historical long shot.
“I applaud and Sen. Atkins in this endeavor, and as my team has been asking for such a maneuver since the early Saving Lives in Custody campaign, l will make myself and the coalition available to the senator for the future legislative rollout.”
Other elements of the bill also would have a significant impact for the families — and taxpayers — who are left to deal with the costs of deaths in local jails.
According to an advance copy of the bill language provided by Atkins’ office, the legislation would require sheriffs to release investigative reports, photographs, audio and video evidence, interview transcripts, disciplinary records and other materials to the public upon request.
Redactions, or blacking out portions of the documents, would be permitted only in limited cases, such as to protect witnesses, whistleblowers, personal data and medical or financial information.
“Records subject to disclosure under this section shall be provided at the earliest possible time and no later than 45 days from the date of a request for their disclosure,” the bill language states.
Van Swearingen is a lawyer with the Rosen Bien Galvan & Grunfeld firm, one of several firms suing San Diego County in an effort to force the sheriff to make changes to mental health and medical care in jails.
He described Atkins’ legislation as “a much-needed step towards transparency and ability.”
“For years, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department has withheld critical information about in-custody deaths from the public and has been unable to, itself, remedy the continuing risks to people who are incarcerated at the jail,” Swearingen said.
The Union-Tribune published the results of a six-month investigation in 2019 that found San Diego County far outpaced all other large California counties in the number of people who died in custody.
The “Dying Behind Bars” series relied on thousands of pages of court records, autopsies, independent reviews and other documents to show the rates of suicides, homicides, natural and accidental deaths were in some cases more than double those of similar-sized counties.
It also reported that for many of the 140-plus deaths in the prior 10 years of then-Sheriff Bill Gore’s istration, taxpayers spent almost $8 million paying legal settlements to families of people who died in jail for alleged negligence.
The investigation prompted widespread outrage across the community, even as Gore disputed the statistics the Union-Tribune cited for its analyses. Gore said the paper wrongly relied on the federal standard for in-custody deaths, rather than the approach used by an expert his department hired.
Not long after the investigation was published — and as the jail death toll continued to climb — state lawmakers requested an audit of the San Diego Sheriff’s Department.
The California State Auditor released the findings early last year — on the same day Gore quit as sheriff, less than a year before his term expired. The report was sharply critical of the sheriff and his top s, saying their practices appeared to lead to unnecessary fatalities.
“Our review identified deficiencies with how the Sheriff’s Department provides care for and protects incarcerated individuals, which likely contributed to in-custody deaths,” the state auditor wrote.
The audit led directly to the Weber bill that ed the Legislature but was vetoed last year.
Atkins said Wednesday that she would work with the governor to win his for the latest version of Weber’s bill, as well as her own legislation.
“It’s a serious bill, and I’m fairly certain there will be pushback, as you can imagine,” she said. “But I wouldn’t introduce this if we weren’t serious about getting it into law. I’ve got two years left, and this is one of the important bills I want to do.”
Atkins will be forced to leave the state Senate next year due to term limits.
