INMATES SLEEP ON FLOORS IN OVERFLOWING CELL BLOCKS

New Construction, Lower Crime Rates Fail To Ease Situation

It's a slow day at the San Francisco County Jail.

The orange-clad bodies of sleeping inmates who can't be fit into bunks are
scattered around the concrete floor of an old holding tank on the sixth
floor of the Hall of Justice -- on thin, jail-issue mattresses.

In a crowded cell block that serves as a makeshift psychiatric ward for
mentally ill inmates, a man pleads with jail officials for a higher dose of
medication, saying the voices in his head are telling him to hang himself.

On the seventh floor, where the jail's most serious offenders sometimes
spend years waiting for trials, inmates hang on the white bars of their
cells, calling out a litany of complaints to a passing visitor. The
windowless building is sweltering hot, they say, the food is inedible, the
guards are cruel and there are 14 potentially violent men crammed in cells
made for only 12.

"We understand we may be criminals or whatever you want to call us," says
Randall Evans, who has been in the jail since December, awaiting trial on
robbery charges. "But we're humans too."

Despite new construction that increased the jail's capacity by 440 beds in
1996 and a huge drop in the local crime rate, The City's jails have
remained so packed with prisoners that several of the units regularly
violate state codes.

The conditions -- in the often-overpacked cell blocks at the Hall of
Justice and in The City's dilapidated jail building in San Bruno -- have
led to inmate protests and a long string of costly federal lawsuits against
The City. The 65-year-old San Bruno facility, known as Jail 3, poses such
earthquake and fire hazards to its 550 inmates that a federal judge has
declared it unconstitutional.

Yet the demand for jail space has kept growing. No one can explain exactly
why, but it's a statewide phenomenon.

In 1996 and 1997 the average daily jail population in San Francisco looked
like it was starting to drop. But in May 1998, the numbers started rising
again.

This spring, San Francisco jails were so full that the overflow of inmates
in the Hall of Justice had to be housed in a gymnasium.

"If you're going to have a policy of putting lots of people in jail, you
have to have the space for them and you have to be able to maintain that
space to standards of decency," said Sheriff Michael Hennessey. "We aren't
there yet."

Since 1993, the number of violent crimes reported in San Francisco has
dropped by nearly half and the number of citizen complaints of burglaries
and car thefts have fallen 40 percent. Arrests for such offenses have dropped.

But the keepers of the jail system have hardly noticed.

As tough-on-crime policies have swept the state, the number of inmates
requiring jail cells has crept doggedly upward.

Statistics show that, despite the drop in crime, as many people as ever are
being booked into the jail system. And surveys by the Sheriff's Department
indicate they are staying in jail longer than in the past.

A similar jail population boom has echoed up and down the state.

In 1975 there were an average of 23,320 inmates in California county jails
on any given day. By 1998 that number had tripled to 77,000.

"Despite ..... building efforts that have more than doubled the jail space
in the last 18 years, California's jail system is facing an immediate and
severe capacity crisis," says a 1998 report by the California Board of
Corrections.

Like five of San Francisco's six jails, the vast majority of California's
county jail facilities violate at least some state standards on the
conditions in which prisoners should be kept. Those standards include
everything from proper diets and exercise to the appropriate cell size.

Some say that, as a result of the "three strikes" law, which since 1994 has
required life prison terms for three-time felons, more people charged with
felonies are demanding full trials, thus keeping them in county jail longer.

Statewide, the average stay in jail has lengthened by 7 days in the last
decade to an average of 23.7 days per prisoner. On any given day, that
means there are 23,000 more prisoners in the system.

Traditionally, jails existed as a means of short-term punishment for petty
offenders or as holding tanks for those waiting for trial on serious
charges. The state prison system is supposed to be where people serve time
for major crimes.

But as California prisons have grown increasingly overcrowded, more judges
are sentencing offenders to county jail time, said Barbara Baker,
spokeswoman for the state Board of Corrections.

Partly, this is because many counties, including San Francisco, offer
better rehabilitation programs, Baker said.

"The state prisons are overcrowded and, when money is short, one of the
first things to go is rehabilitation," she said. "If a city or county can
afford rehabilitation programs, many judges prefer to sentence people there."

Yet, on any given day, the vast majority of San Francisco's jail inmates
have not yet been convicted. Nearly three-quarters are awaiting trial or
sentencing.

Sheriff's officials say 40 to 50 percent of those booked into the jail are
released within 96 hours -- on bail, on their own recognizance or because
charges were dropped. Of those who do stay longer, most spend four or five
months, as their cases move through the courts.

In the sixth floor jail at the Hall of Justice, Jason Snelling, a
20-year-old, homeless youth arrested on charges of possession of marijuana
for sale, is experiencing firsthand the results of jail overcrowding.

On this recent day, he's been in jail 48 hours -- half the time spent lying
with eight other guys on the floor of a gray holding cell because
authorities had nowhere else to put him.

"They've just been moving me from room to room," says Snelling, adding that
he has no idea how long he will be in jail.

On this day, the jail is technically just under its maximum capacity of
2,116, set by the state Board of Corrections. But the process of
classifying inmates and dividing them according to their risk of harming
other inmates has left jailers with nowhere to put a small group of low
security inmates like Snelling, who wouldn't be safe with any other groups.

"We just try to put people in spaces where there are beds," said Chief
Deputy Vicki Hennessy (no relation to the sheriff) who oversees all city
jails. "Frankly, lately we've been ending up putting people on the floors."

The sheriff estimates that, on any given day, a third of the inmates in the
jail are there on drug charges; another third are awaiting trials on
violent crimes, from murder to battery, and the remaining third face
charges on nonviolent crimes, ranging from burglary to shoplifting and
prostitution.

A 1991 federal suit over conditions in The City's oldest jail -- in San
Bruno -- led to improvements there, but shifted overcrowding problem to
Hall of Justice jails in San Francisco.

As recently as three years ago, the Hall of Justice jails were under a
20-year federal consent decree, because of overcrowding and unsafe housing
conditions. That court order was lifted when The City opened its new
Seventh Street jails in 1996, increasing capacity by 440 beds.

Now the court's attention is focused almost solely on Jail 3 in San Bruno,
where 550 inmates are housed in a crumbling building with earthquake, fire
and health safety violations.

So this year, when the number of inmates in city jails sometimes exceeded
the maximum state-authorized capacity by more than 115, the extras ended up
crowded onto the floors of the Hall of Justice jails.

While the Hall of Justice jails haven't reached a state of total
deterioration like the 65-year-old San Bruno building, their outdated
design presents even more immediate dangers to inmates, according the the
sheriff.

The cells are arranged along a long corridor. The only way deputies can see
what's going on inside is to walk down the rows, looking in one cell at a
time.

On the seventh floor, where most of the jail's violent offenders are kept,
that has led to internal security problems.

Here, men are kept in groups of 12 to 14 in cells comprised of two small
interconnected rooms. One room contains six sets of bunk beds; the other
has a picnic table and a television attached to the ceiling. Many of these
cells are over capacity and have two men sleeping on the floor, leaving
little space for others to walk around.

"I'm a floor sleeper," says Terry Havro, one of about 20 federal prisoners
housed in the jail.

"I'm sleeping with all this filth and I'm HIV positive," says Havro, who
faces weapons charges. "It's very unhealthy."

Many of the men on the seventh floor are accused of violent crimes like
murder, armed robbery and rape. The sheriff admits it can be a dangerous
place.

"We've had at least two murders in recent years," Hennessey said. "We've
had stabbings and throat slashings. If we could put these people in single
cells, we could prevent them from hurting each other. With 12 or 16 men in
a cell, it's hard for deputies to do that."

Last month, prisoners got so fed up with the conditions on this floor that
about 20 of them protested by throwing breakfast trays on the floor. Their
complaints included charges of mistreatment and brutality, uncooked food
and being forced to sleep on floors.

The protest led to most of them being put in "administrative segregation,"
which meant they were locked by themselves in smaller cells and not allowed
to mix with other inmates.

While in lock-down, inmate Vincent Hines, 45, a long-term prisoner with a
history of cardiac problems, who had been a protest leader, died of a heart
attack. His family charged that he hadn't received proper care or medication.

His death sparked further protest -- this time by civil rights groups
outside the jail and has led the Board of Supervisors to conduct a hearing
on the quality of health care in the jail.

In June, the jail also began early release of some inmates to thin the
swelling population.

Locally, two policy changes get some of the blame for San Francisco's most
recent jump in jail population, which began in May 1998.

Last October, San Francisco judges raised bail for many offenses to make
them comparable to other jurisdictions in the state. For example, bail for
burglary went from $15,000 to $40,000.

And in January, a new state law put limits on the types of offenders who
could be released on their own recognizance.

"I see the bail schedule making a big change," said Hennessey, who showed
monthly reports indicating the number of people released from jail on bail
or their own recognizance was down substantially. "Three strikes has been
in effect a long time. But our jail population has gone up by 15 percent
just in the last six months."

Court officials say they don't believe the new bail schedules made much
difference, noting that most recent boom in jail population started before
the hikes.

Hennessey and others also say that the size of the jail population has less
to do with the crime rate, which is based on the number of citizen
complaints about serious violent and property crimes, than the capacity of
the criminal justice system to handle cases.

"One of my theories is the number of people in the jails depends on the
number of police available to make arrests," Hennessey said.

Local crime statistics show that even as the complaints of crimes like
murder, robbery, burglary and car thefts have dropped, an increase in drug
cases has kept the number of felony arrests roughly the same.

While arrests for felony acts of violence and property crimes declined by
1,463 a year since 1993, the number of arrests for felony drug offenses
(usually sales) rose by about 1,400. "We're putting more and more people
with nonviolent, drug-related problems in jail," said Mimi Silbert, a
member of the state Board of Corrections and the founder of the San
Francisco's Delancey Street Foundation, which works to rehabilitate
offenders through job training and drug treatment. "If we continued in the
direction we're now going, America would have to buy the continents of
Africa and Asia to house all the prisoners, because all we're doing is
locking them up."

Inside the jail's massive new intake facility behind the Hall of Justice, a
man's hysterical screams reverberate off the rows of glass-paneled offices
that run up and down the center of the building.

Arrested by police in the throes of a violent psychiatric crisis, the man
is thrashing about in a padded room. He shouts out harsh, guttural
sentences that sound like dire warnings, but the words are unintelligible.

He won't be staying long. A wad of papers inside a sleeve hanging outside
his safety cell indicates that he will soon be delivered to the county
hospital's jail unit as an emergency psychiatric case.

It's likely, jail officials say, that he will be restrained there and given
medication. Most likely he will be kept in the hospital 72 hours, then
released or returned to the jail, depending on the charges he was picked up
on.

In either case, it probably won't be long before he's back. He, and
hundreds of other people suffering from mental illness are regular
customers at the jail.

"He's here once a week," said sheriff's Lt. Scott Erdman. "That's the
problem we have with psychiatric cases. It gets very expensive."

Jo Robinson, who runs the jail's psychiatric programs for the San Francisco
Health Department, said the number of mentally ill inmates has swollen
since the '80s, when the state cut funding for mental health and released
many patients from state mental hospitals.

On any given day, she figures, there are about 220 people in the jail --
one out of every ten inmates -- with serious mental illnesses.

"It's a bad situation," she said. "There's a difference between mentally
ill people whose crimes are symptoms of their illnesses and mentally ill
people with genuine criminal intent."

She said many of the people who end up in jail fit into the former group.
Often they might be arrested for drugs or trespassing or things like
lighting fires in public to keep warm, she said, or they might be in such
psychiatric crisis that they are threatening to people.

Once in jail, they often get better care than they might outside. "We can't
pretend we don't see their problems, because they're here," said Robinson.
"If they were on the street, it's possible that nobody would notice they
needed help."