In a decision that will grow more momentous in hindsight than it did in the moment, the county supervisors voted unanimously — with one member absent — to spend $167 million to build six additional housing units (or one-and-a-half new “pods”) while paving the way to shut down all but a small portion of South County’s Main Jail. All this new housing is supposed to happen by 2029.
A coalition of criminal-justice reformers and mental-health advocates showed up to urge the supervisors to pause and build only four new housing units for the Northern Branch Jail. The average daily population of the two facilities combined has plummeted by 17 percent — 141 inmates — in the last year alone. Why spend more money on the infrastructure of incarceration, the activists pressed, when it could be better spent on programs getting mental health services and other programmatic assistance to people whose criminal transgressions stems from their mental-health challenges?
As much as jail populations are dropping today, Supervisor Steve Lavagnino responded, they will start going back up when all the zoning changes recently approved begin sprouting up new housing units in Lompoc, Santa Maria, and Goleta, where just one proposed development is expected to generate as many people as the whole town of Buellton…