The Jail System Master Plan

Jail System Master Plan
© by Mark Dempsey

Sacramento County is debating what to do with its jail and the accompanying staff–the punishment bureaucracy. One of the motivations for this inquiry is that the County lost the “Mays Decision,” a court case that requires the jail to stop mistreating prisoners.

Meanwhile, 60-80% of the prisoners in County Jail now are not convicted of anything, except being unable to pay bail. In Sacramento County, you’re not innocent until proven guilty; you’re guilty until proven wealthy.

So…is the County’s Master Plan discussing alternatives to incarceration like no cash bail, like Washington, D.C. and Illinois already have? Like the rest of the world (except the Philippines)? Not much, unless the public mentions these alternatives. It’s worth remembering that the recent California Kowalczyk court decision says setting unaffordable bail as a means of detaining prisoners for longer is illegal. Oddly, the Master Planners dismissed that decision as insignificant when mentioned, even though implementing it might reduce the jail population significantly, and free up the space the planners say is in short supply.

The “summary” document–58 pages, a truly exhausting “summary”--provided, as the footer of each page says, “On Advice of Counsel”--begins with acknowledgements of the existing punishment bureaucracy’s contribution to the debate, and continues, discussing a physical expansion of the main jail, stating that their study “reflected significant gaps in space needs for programs and support.”

Could freeing 60-80% of the space in the jail by releasing those incarcerated with unaffordable bail fill those “gaps in space needs”? Even the Master Plan acknowledges facility improvements are secondary (“Although improved facilities are important, the primary measure of compliance with the Consent Decree remains the ability to provide timely, clinically responsive services through effective staffing, operations, policies, and procedures.”) Yet architecture and new construction remain prominent topics of conversation in this public outreach.

Sacramento is not really an outlier in the US. The US incarcerates at roughly five times the world’s per-capita average, seven times more than Canada. Canada also has lower crime rates than the US.

Meanwhile, the US has more than half a million medical bankruptcies annually, and Canada has Medicare for all. Could expanding social programs reduce crime more effectively and cheaply than building more cages? After all, Canada’s Medicare-for-all is roughly half as expensive as the US’ healthcare system, and provides better outcomes. A World Health Organization study comparing different countries’ healthcare systems (life expectancy, infant mortality, patient satisfaction, etc.) ranks the US 37th, between Costa Rica and Slovenia. The Sacramento Bee said it’s as though we have the healthcare of Costa Rica and pay six times more for the privilege.

The Mays decision supposedly compelling this conversation does not request a jail expansion. Yet, the relentless focus of this “Master Plan” is to expand facilities in the most expensive possible location (downtown Sacramento), not the cheaper-to-expand Los Rios location. The summary seldom talks about changing policies or personnel–although it does mention the difficulty in hiring mental health staff.

Not mentioned at all: architectural firms specializing in jail construction tend to increase their business by sponsoring studies recommending expansions. Says one article, “All over the country, architecture firms make the case for bigger jails — then get hired to design them.” This kind of self-dealing is the hallmark of big projects that are poorly done and over budget, says Bent Flyvbjerg, one of the world’s leading experts on such construction.

The Plan’s summary mentions that there is a chance for public input in their process. The first (virtual) meeting allowed live questions for the assembled panel. These apparently proved inconvenient, so the next virtual meeting only allows questions typed in the Zoom meeting’s chat–a way to limit participation, or spontaneity, but given the County’s intransigence in responding to popular requests, and its willingness to suppress dissent generally, it’s not a big surprise.

The County enjoys its share of the largest homeless population since the Great Depression, and isn’t above criminalizing homelessness, either, which studies show worsens conditions for the poor. That’s right, civic leaders will tell you the homeless are “mentally ill,” and there’s some understandable PTSD that accompanies homelessness, but studies say the majority of homeless are just too poor to afford rent. In one survey, 85% of the unhoused questioned said they would rent a place if they could afford it.

The next public input session is scheduled for November 19, 2026, at 5 PM. Here is the link to register. Meanwhile, the state of prisoners remains deplorable. One editorial example about US prisons generally: It’s Halloween, But the Real Horror Is the US Prison System. 

In this writer’s opinion, the real point of our current incarceration policies isn’t justice; it’s “labor discipline.” Labor discipline sends the message that “You had better take whatever crappy job is on offer, or suffer the indignities of poverty, even homelessness or starvation, and if you’re rebellious, we’ll put you in a cage.” That’s a message as old as capitalism.

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Update: From the Sacramento News & Review / Sacramento Observer: Nov. 4:
Sacramento delays police reforms for audit that won’t examine discipline

Like the Pentagon, local police resist audits.
 

Canadian Police Admit the Obvious

 

SHOCKING! Winnipeg police acknowledged that enforcement doesn't address poverty, homelessness, mental health challenges or addiction. Resources do. You can arrest people, seize drugs and clear encampments, but you can't police away the conditions driving these crises. Housing, treatment, harm reduction and community support are essential to lasting public safety. We will never arrest our way out of problems that require investment in people. https://t.co/pCaxvm8w0K

— guyfelicella🇨🇦🍁 (@guyfelicella) November 8, 2026

Is Aid to Israel Cut? (Hint: It's politics as usual)

 

US is NOT cutting aid to Israel. Plan is to move it from State's budget--where the $ is formally classified as aid--to the Pentagon, where the $ is "cooperative" (but functions as aid). This is why $500M/yr for Israeli missile programs doesn't appear on foreignassistance dot gov

— Stephen Semler (@stephensemler) November 3, 2026

Economics, Climate ... & ... Learning from the Great Depression

 

William Nordhaus: Growth & Climate

The successor to Paul Samuelson’s text is (co-author) Nordhaus’s update. Samuelson's is the economics text I read in Econ 101. Nordhaus is a (Riksbank) Nobel winner for his work on the economic effects of climate change.

Excerpt:
 

But the business-as-usual baseline, against which costs of [climate related] action are measured, conveys a misleading message to policymakers that fossil fuels can be consumed in ever greater quantities without any negative consequences to growth itself.
 

Steve Keen, a heterodox economist, produced a blistering critique of IAMs and how they understate hugely the impact on global warming on economies and the planet. Keen says the IAM “assumed that empirical relationships derived from data on change in temperature and GDP between 1960 and 2014 can be extrapolated out to 2100—thus assuming that 3.2°C more of global warming won’t alter the climate! They have assumed that tipping points—critical features of the Earth’s climate such as the Greenland and West Antarctic icesheets, the Amazon rainforest, and the “Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation” which keeps Europe warm today—can be tipped with only minimal additional damage to GDP.”

The great merit of Nordhaus’ work is that he always tried to use empirical evidence to support his models; he was not just an arcane neoclassical micro theorist. However, what seriously weakened his contributions was his commitment to the unrealistic assumptions of neoclassical theory.


James Galbraith: What Can the Last Great Crash Say About the Next One? Oil, AI, and the Perils of Technological Revolution

This is a terrific article well worth reading in full. A few excerpts:

All life requires resources, which must be extracted from the environment, with a sufficient surplus so as to make it possible to work, develop, grow and reproduce. And this is no less true of any mechanical system, or of any economy. Access to resources requires energy, which comes in the first instance from sunlight, or from its stored forms, including wood, coal, oil, natural gas – as well as the nuclei of certain very heavy atoms. To get at the energy requires tools, which are built according to plans, and at increasing levels of complexity as technologies advance. But complexity is a two-edged sword. It permits ever-greater efficiency in the use of resources, thus ever-greater levels of production and the improvement in human life – but it induces fragility in the system as a whole. Once a system is built, it functions in a certain, predictable and predetermined way, so long as the conditions for which it was designed hold good. But those conditions may change. Simple systems are robust; complex ones are prone to major breakdowns and disasters.

Economic value arises because that which is necessary, or desired, is often scarce. And this is particularly true of goods or services that are newly created, imagined, or packaged in such a way as to appear to be new. Innovation is by definition recent, and by definition has a single originator. Innovation is usually achieved by introducing a new level of complexity, as well as other improvements of design or recombination of existing technical forms. During the window, however brief, when imitations are few, the originator enjoys a degree of market and monopoly power, enhancing the economic value associated with the scarcity of the innovation. This is the moment when fortunes can be made. And economic life is dominated by the search for fortune, arising from producing that which is new, better, or made more cheaply but just as well, than that which already exists.

These are the basic elements of what Jing Chen and I, in a small book published in 2025, have called “entropy economics.” Our goal was (and is) to bring economics into alignment with the understanding, now prevalent in every other field of human inquiry, of the second law of thermodynamics – the entropy law – which is the most fundamental law of nature. We believe that this is the key to understanding that there was, in fact, a precipitating technological event behind both the Great Crash and the Depression.

For mainstream (neoclassical) economics, technological change is a largely continuous process, with phases of acceleration and deceleration. It cannot make things worse. That is why mainstream economists are relentless techno-enthusiasts – they see the dynamism of capitalism as its principal justification, in the face of inequalities, environmental degradation, and the working population’s native suspicion of the capitalist class. Joseph Schumpeter, a conservative but definitely non-mainstream observer of the 1930s, took a much colder and more clear-eyed view, summed up in the phrase “creative destruction.” Schumpeter’s insight was that new technologies destroy older civilizations and ways of life, leading (he argued) to improvements for the survivors but not without severe costs for those invested in the previous systems and methods. Indeed for this reason peasant farmers and medieval guilds were by nature technologically conservative: they wanted to keep what they had and were not concerned about the great gains accruing later on to someone else. Schumpeter however, so far as I’m aware, did not specifically identify a new technology bridging the crucial moment in this story.

We believe that the precipitating event, in this instance, was the announcement of the discovery, in Texas, Oklahoma and California, of vast reserves of oil.

[My addition: Which triggered a destruction of the old economy based on coal. Also helpful in making things worse: Coolidge and Hoover made national debt significantly smaller.]

 

 

 

Who controls bond interest?

 

Esto es rotundamente falso: el coste de la deuda pública no depende de los mercados, sino del banco central. Datos, no relatos. https://t.co/Mf6K8wij1O

— Eduardo Garzón (@edugaresp) November 2, 2026

English:
This is flatly false: the cost of public debt does not depend on the markets, but on the central bank. Data, not stories.
From the quoted Tweet: Escrivá warns of excessive public debt: "Markets may start to doubt and the situation could get complicated"

The domination of banks (UK edition)

 

Central banks have been handed independence and used it to become the unaccountable core of the system. This is what banking tyranny looks like , the literally domination of power by the banking elites taken to the point the country literally collapses . Liz Truss is right: they have grown megalomaniacal. The governor of the Bank of England can’t be sacked; a prime minister can. That is not a technical detail. It is the actual power arrangement. The mechanism and motivation is financialisation. It’s the core purpose of banking and in its current form it threatens the states existence . Basel rules force banks to hold far more capital against a factory loan than against a mortgage. Inflation targets treat rising house and land prices as “asset transfers,” not inflation, so rates never cool the boom. Credit is therefore created against the existing housing stock and financial assets, the renter class, while industrial capacity is starved. Bankers literally live in ivory towers so they don’t notice till late in the cycle . Workers’ wages are financialised into rents, mortgages and debt service. The West has been deindustrialised to the point it can no longer make what it needs. Bankers add no productive capacity to the society at all other than pulling forward production or asset inflation through debt . This is the Tindale Trap conceit : maintaining financial dominance together with a material conversion failure. This bifurcation literally leaves the state with no productive capacity to to maintain sovereign existence . Like draining blood you eventually get to weak to respond . Truss tried a growth agenda that cut against the orthodoxy. The Bank’s timing of gilt sales, the LDI structures it regulated, and the narrative that followed removed her. Independence was sold as insulation from politics. It has instead insulated a credit-allocation regime that privileges financialisation over production and protects itself against elected challenge. The direction of credit is the mechanism, and the political outcome is exactly what Truss is pointing to. We live under a global banking dictatorship

— 🇦🇺Craig Tindale (@ctindale) October 29, 2026

Who is really to blame?

 

“Russian interference” is thisclose to topping French pop charts! https://t.co/F1i3VuicmF

— Margarita Simonyan (@M_Simonyan) October 30, 2026