Enlarge the Jail? Sacramento County's Misstep

(c) by Mark Dempsey

Sacramento County will have another "listening session" Thursday, August 27th at 5 PM concerning its "Jail System Master Planning." Pre-register for the Zoom session here if you're interested. You can also send an email leading up to and following the webinar through September 10, 2026, by emailing PSJA@saccounty.gov

As someone who sat on a County Planning Advisory Council for nearly a decade, I can testify that it's often difficult to cut through the distractions and misdirection in County hearings. In this case, odds are that the County will want to confine testimony and any agenda or presentation to comments about "Jail System Master Planning" -- the title of the session. 

But confining comments to the alternatives of Jail-Big/Jail-Small/Jail-Stays-the Same is really marketing more than genuinely addressing the problem of crime. As Boss Tweed used to say, "I don't care who people vote for as long as I can pick the candidates." 

The bigger question is whether cops, courts, and cages are the best way to handle crime. While Hollywood tells us that detectives always nab the bad guy, and the courts get any that the detectives miss, reality is completely different. Cops solve less than 15% of crimes--13.2% of felonies in California in 2022. They don't even solve the majority of murders. Don't take my word for it; Google "what percentage of crimes do police solve?" 

Even worse: The current County Jail is full, but seldom heard in the "listening" is the fact that 60%-80% of the prisoners aren't convicted of anything other than being unable to pay bail. In Sacramento County, you're not "innocent until proven guilty," you're "guilty until proven wealthy."

This also makes plea bargains an extortion racket. Without trials or convictions, District Attorneys can tell those unable to raise bail that they can plead guilty to a charge, pay a fine and time served, then they'll be released. This lets prisoners, guilty or not, out, at a price, but gives them a criminal record. Its positive effect is that it lets poor people keep their job or family. Its negative effect is that it criminalizes poverty.

Is there any County proposal to have no cash bail, or some kind of supervised release? Not that I can detect. The State of Illinois initiated no cash bail without dramatic consequences. In fact, the US and the Philippines are the only nations on the planet using cash bail.

Because of such policies, the US incarceration rate is among the highest in the world, at five times the world's per-capita average, seven times more than Canada's per-capita incarceration. Is Canadian crime way worse than US crime? Nope. Canada has lower crime rates. 

Here's how US incarceration looks in comparison to its NATO allies:

 

It hasn't always been that way. Here's the history of incarceration in the US:

If that were not bad enough, current County policy, like policies throughout the US, increasingly criminalizes poverty. Sacramento County Supervisor Rodriguez actually celebrated courts permitting homeless sweeps on public property. 

Having police handle homelessness and poverty typically means criminalizing those things. There are alternatives. Contra Costa County now has a program ("Destination: Home") that prevents homelessness by providing emergency rent subsidies. The Federal Reserve reports 40% of the population can't handle a $400 emergency, so lots of people are living on the brink of losing food, medication and/or shelter.

Where are the County's proposals for the cheaper, more effective alternatives to Jail? The fact that this "listening" is entitled "Jail System Master Planning," not "Jail or Free Clinics," or "Jail or Emergency Rent Subsidies" is yet another indicator of its bias.

There are cheaper, more effective ways to prevent crime like social services, but cops, courts and cages don't get as much budget scrutiny, and are very expensive. If you want to cure addiction with incarceration, it costs seven times more than medical treatment ("rehab"), and medical treatment cures more addicts. Canada has lower crime rates and lower incarceration rates, while the US has higher crime rates and a half million medical bankruptcies that Canada's (cheaper) Medicare-for-all prevents.

Sacramento's population wants safety, but constantly hears homeless people are mentally ill or addicted. Even if surveys disclose that most are just too poor to afford rent. This means ever-larger cages to keep the crazy addicts away is an easy sale. Incidentally, surveys say the majority of homeless are not mentally ill or addicts; they're just poor.

Most of us would object to training even a pet with cages and beatings--and the County lost the "Mays Decision" court case for mistreating prisoners, not because the jail was too small--yet that's the implicit bias in "Jail System Master Planning" debates. County policy endorses the all-sticks, no-carrots approach as a response to crime most people would find disgusting if it were practiced by the SPCA on our pets. Somehow, though, we've been persuaded human beings don't qualify for better treatment. 

From here, it looks like the mental illness isn't confined to homeless (poor) people. It's guiding the region's public policy. As Ian Welsh (the source of the graphs above) says: "[T]he truth is that America’s incarceration, court and police systems are all world-class piles of flaming garbage and everyone involved with them knows it."

Are alternatives politically possible? This just in:

The public overwhelmingly prefers spending on social services and root causes over spending more on policing. What got lost in the defund/abolish language is that the underlying thrust of the policy approach is quite popular.

People just don't like the ultra-woke stuff of… https://t.co/jA8Jq08JZu

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) August 11, 2026