[Monterey County] Squid reads the county's and sheriff's responses to the Grand Jury.

Jail Break…Squid can’t believe summer is already over, partly because summer seems to begin in Monterey County in the fall. But the Squidlets have already gone back to school, the days are getting shorter, and the Monterey County Board of Supervisors comes back Tuesday, Aug. 29 from summer recess.

One item on the board’s agenda tomorrow includes filing responses to the Monterey County Civil Grand Jury’s reports, released June 26, knocking the Monterey County Jail and Monterey County Sheriff’s Office for understaffing and lack of adequate services. (In the report titled, “Monterey County Jail, Insufficient Number of Deputies: Car 54, Where Are You?” Squid’s search for any mention of Car 54 took Squid to a 1960s sitcom of that name, which struck Squid as a strange moment of comic relief for an otherwise unfunny Grand Jury.)

Monterey County’s grand jury doesn’t wield enforcement powers; they operate by investigating issues, writing reports on their findings and then hoping agencies they’ve investigated actually do something. In the case of the jail, the gist of the county supes’ and the sheriff’s reply is: Thanks, but no thanks.

The grand jury’s report on the jail, titled “Monterey County Jail Crisis: Our De Facto Mental Health Facility,” captured one of the profound challenges of crime and incarceration: the correlation with mental illness.

“The jail, with approximately 45 percent of its 900 inmates dealing with mental illness is, by default, serving as a de facto mental health facility,” the grand jury wrote.

The reply, from Sheriff Steve Bernal: “The sheriff’s office disagrees with this finding. Mental illness refers to a wide range of mental health conditions, which affect behavior in a wide range of ways…The county jail is not a licensed psychiatric health facility. The county jail is not designed, staffed or equipped to function as a mental health facility.”

That’s exactly the idea—it’s designed, staffed and equipped to be a jail, not a psychiatric hospital, and therein lies the challenge.

The grand jury’s offers up some recommendations on things to consider doing about the issues. “The Board of Supervisors should fund the building of a new mental health care facility,” they wrote, even pointing out a few potential properties.

Bernal’s response: “This recommendation requires further study.”

The grand jury also recommends the county study models of integrating mental health services into a jail, citing Los Angeles and Santa Clara County as examples.

Again, the response: “This recommendation requires further study.”

So, to recap: the grand jury recommends the Sheriff's Office study bringing mental health services to the jail, and the Sheriff's Office responds by saying it needs to study whether or not to do a study. 

Squid will be studying the situation closely. 

August 28, 2017

Monterey County Weekly

By Squid