There is a story of San Francisco’s jails, but it’s not the jail story you’ve come to know. This is not “The Shawshank Redemption” or “The Longest Yard” or “Escape from Alcatraz” or “Cool Hand Luke” with cruel wardens and sad*stic guards and brutal inmate gangs and escaping to freedom through 500 yards of sh*t-smelling foulness you can’t imagine, or maybe you just don’t want to.
Sadly, rivers of unimaginable sewage does indeed describe the story of a prior iteration of San Francisco’s jails. But not now.
The story now, if you can believe it, is messier. And more complicated. To wit: Behind closed doors and in staff meetings, we have learned that Sheriff’s Department employees admit that their most effective spokesman of late has been a convicted murderer.
“It’s a new breed of inmate in here,” 47-year-old Zuri Wilson last month told Mission Local. “They don’t respect anything. They are mentally unwell. Most of them are drug addicts. It’s total chaos.”
Wilson has been in both San Francisco jails and state prisons since first being convicted in 2013 for laying in wait and shooting Shawntae Otis to death. He described the sheriff’s deputies guarding him in earlier years as “racist cowboys,” but says that’s no longer the case.
“It’s a new kind of staff,” he said. “People from the same cultural backgrounds as us: Asian, Black, Mexican. They are not racist. … The staff are more humane than they were even five or 10 years ago; I don’t blame them for anything going on here. They just don’t know how to deal with this type of person.”
In the weeks preceding our article about Wilson, San Francisco’s jails repeatedly went into lockdown mode following a series of confrontations in which inmates attacked, bit, or beat deputies. A week after our article, Sheriff’s Department employees said in public what Wilson had told us in private regarding chaotic conditions due to far fewer deputies working in the jails as the jail population is surging — with a high percentage of mentally ill, drug-addicted inmates.
Mission Local has learned that, last week, three deputies were briefly hospitalized after breaking up an inmate fight and being attacked by an inmate wielding a broom.
“We knew that we had a workforce crisis in the sheriff’s office; we’ve known this for so long,” bemoaned Supervisor Hillary Ronen at a three-hour hearing on May 14. “We knew that this effort to arrest not only dealers but drug users was going to lead to a much larger jail population of very sick people. … So my No. 1 question is, what was the plan?”
Following that lengthy hearing, the San Francisco Chronicle wrote a strongly worded op-ed that the surge in jail violence was “entirely predictable … yet there’s little political will to act.”
That’s true, but it doesn’t go far enough. Rather: The jail conditions Mission Local has, for years, documented —chaos, a surge in violence, more drug-addicted and mentally ill inmates, severe staffing shortages, cutbacks in programming and inmates languishing in their cells and doing drugs — is the plan.
Prison records indicate that, on May 10, Zuri Wilson was transferred from San Francisco County Jail to California State Prison, Solano in Vacaville. This was what he wanted: He much preferred the order of a state prison, brutally maintained by an unwritten code among inmates, than the “chaos” of San Francisco’s jails.
The conditions he no longer has to deal with came as no surprise to him. Wilson and your humble narrator have been communicating on and off since 2022, and he long foresaw the jail crisis that would be caused by ramped-up arrests of the mentally ill, drug-users and mentally ill drug-users. “I told you the new policies the city was enacting would put all the people in the Tenderloin in jail,” he said in May. “They hadn’t bathed for months in the streets, and they ain’t bathing here.”
A longtime guard said they’ve never seen so many inmates detoxing; a former jail worker said they often wore a mask not just to prevent the spread of disease but to stave off the smell of unwashed men. “It looks like a mini-Tenderloin in there,” they said.
So, again: This is the plan.
And that has trickle-down effects. Sixteen inmates on Friday received their diplomas in a ceremony at County Jail No. 3 in San Bruno. This is legitimately great news. But what’s less great is that 16 is a small number —a fraction of the number of diplomas handed out in prior years. And Five Keys Charter School CEO Steve Good tells Mission Local that there could have been many more —if only there were enough deputies to supervise jail classrooms.
With more deputies, he could hire more teachers. Good thinks Five Keys could reach 100 more students if the deputies were properly staffed: “We can’t staff up until they staff up.”
The demand for in-jail education, he says, is always there. The demand to work as a jail guard in San Francisco, however, isn’t. In this city, it often takes a year to hire a deputy sheriff —and that’s a deputy sheriff who is already academy trained. That’s more than twice as long as it often took a decade ago and far, far longer than surrounding jurisdictions. Maddeningly, in the depths of a staffing crisis, qualified deputies who want to work here are taking other jobs because San Francisco can’t get back to them fast enough.
Did city officials explicitly desire for undermanned guards to be set upon by a growing inmate population, a disproportionate number of whom are struggling with drug-use and mental illness issues? Did they want the depletion of deputies to lead to a commensurate depletion of programming for inmates? Did they want inmates deprived of programming that could turn their lives around?
No, not explicitly. But, here’s the thing: This was the inevitable outcome of the city’s actions and priorities — and, clearly, the city did not care. You cannot beef up emphasis on arresting drug users and beef up every vestige of public safety —except the jails that house inmates and the deputies who guard them —and expect anything else.
So this, de-facto, is the plan. Because the city does not care. There is no political price to pay for allowing —even enabling — chaotic conditions in the jails.
And that is because, by and large, San Franciscans do not care about what goes on in the jails.
It was Fyodor Dostoevsky who said a society can be judged by its prisons. Well, he sure nailed San Francisco: We are aspirational but superficial. This city prides itself on its liberalism, but remains deeply susceptible to cheap populism and simplistic and reactive concepts of justice.
San Francisco in 2016 righteously turned down $80 million in state money to build a new jail facility. Building jails, our Board of Supervisors decried, is reactive. And yet we’re still tossing people into jails —more and more of them every day —but now they’re sent to inadequate facilities with inadequate staffing.
It was Alexis de Toqueville who noted that “a false but clear and precise idea always has more power in the world than one which is true but complex.”
Well, he had San Francisco’s number, too.
There is, again, no political price to pay regarding what transpires within our jails. The well-being of our inmates —and, it would seem, those who work alongside them —is far down this city’s priority list.
It shouldn’t be. One needn’t be a bleeding heart to desire better. Even a wholly self-interested person should care about this.
“Unless they get life without parole, the people in jail are all coming back. They are coming back, to your neighborhood,” says former Assistant Sheriff Michael Marcum, a department employee from 1973 to 2012.
“It’s your choice: Do you want them coming back after having found some dignity for the first time in their lives with a high school and college diploma, or clean for 60 days or learning how to be a parent and getting their child back from the foster system?”
The alternative, he says, is “getting started in violence and chaos and being warehoused and that is what they will look for when they get to prison. And they will find it.”
Jail inmates, Marcum continues, “are not some others or aliens. They are part of the community. They are part of San Francisco.”
This is something too many San Franciscans just can’t imagine. Or maybe we just don’t want to.
