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Editorial: There’s an alarming number of people dying in San Diego County jails. It’s inexcusable.

Sheriff Bill Gore
(U-T)

Too many preventable suicides continue to happen

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The report Friday in The San Diego Union-Tribune about the unusually high rate of inmate deaths in county jails depicts a Sheriff’s Department that knows it has a problem but can’t stop it. Since 2009, the year Bill Gore became sheriff, 140 inmates have died — from poor health, suicide, overdoses and homicide. One hundred fifteen were awaiting trial.

In a brief interview with an editorial writer, Gore said, “We’ve worked very hard to address the suicides and to improve our mental health and health care in our jails.” He also said, “One suicide in our jails is too many.” There have been 39 on his watch.

Gore has been open to criticism and receptive to new approaches to enduring problems before. It’s a key reason the U-T Editorial Board endorsed his successful re-election campaign last year. We continue to think of the sheriff as well-meaning and principled. But the jails need better oversight now.

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It is inexcusable for death to be so much more common per capita in San Diego County jails than in other large California jail systems. A 2018 report by the Disability Rights California advocacy group found the San Diego County jail suicide rate was five times higher than that of the state prison system.

The U-T report showed however good Gore’s intentions might be, county jails must do better. One passage makes that point powerfully.

“Despite years of controversy over departmental lapses and repeated promises of reform, deaths this year include:

“A young man who repeatedly threatened to commit suicide and had access to a plastic bag to suffocate himself after being found earlier in the day with a noose in his cell.

“A 34-year-old with a serious heart condition who was given cough syrup instead of his prescription medication when he told staff he was having trouble breathing.

“A young veteran who struggled with opiate and methamphetamine addiction after his hand was blown off in Afghanistan. He died with withdrawal symptoms less than an hour after being returned to his cell from the infirmary.”

While some safety improvements have been made at the county’s seven detention facilities and mental health care is getting more resources than before, the U-T investigation noted that the Sheriff’s Department has not taken such obvious steps as installing extensive fencing on the upper floors of its three largest jails to make attempts to commit suicide by jumping much less common.

Given that the county has had to pay at least $7.9 million over the last decade under Gore — more than four times what it paid the previous decade — to families of those who died or were badly hurt while in jail, no one can argue that excessive cost is precluding those improvements or the hiring of more mental-health professionals or extra monitoring of potentially suicidal inmates. Suicides are up 70% decade over decade. Gore needs to show county supervisors and the community he will address this.

So what should the Sheriff’s Department do? A start would be to heed itself. The U-T report noted that internal documents released as part of litigation included an undated slideshow that called jail suicides “a definite problem” and cited the need for additional mental health professionals, better training for staff and contractors, and better efforts to identify and protect troubled inmates.

There is no question that Gore and his staff have taken steps toward these goals. But until there is hard evidence their efforts are paying off, they deserve not just scrutiny but criticism. With an inmate dying every month, the Sheriff’s Department needs to fix a culture that has tolerated death for so long and overhaul a system that has made it so common.

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