in terms of replacing the project. thank you. >> that concludes the department presentation, so, we're open to any questions you may have or we can wait. >> i have just a couple quick questions. going back to the question that supervisor yee was asking about, cj2, i know we heard from sheriff mirkarimi on that. bull i'm wondering if you have any plans to study more in-depth where this fits into the need to replace 3 and 4. ~ but >> [speaker not understood] the program manager can speak on that. he's right here in the room. he's from dpw. >> thank you. >> i'm sorry, jim [speaker not understood]. >> my name is jim buker with the department of public works. ~ the cj2s was originally built

as a work furlough facility and our understanding is that the sheriff's department is currently using it as a housing unit for women that are in the jail system and also for mental health pod. and, so, they are using cj2 as intensively as that facility can currently be used. it isn't constructed at maximum security standards. if we were to convert that facility to maximum security, we would essentially be replacing the existing beds for maximum security beds and we would still have the same need for beds somewhere in the system for women's facilities for mental health facilities. >> i understand the perspective and the conclusion, but i think what i'm looking for is the analysis. and i know that i certainly would like to ask the budget

and legislative ablist to look into that issue further. ~ analyst maybe you have done the analysis. i haven't seen that analysis. i visited cj2 and i understand that even if you continue with its existing use, there are thing that you have to do actually to make it even better. but i do want to see more exploration of how to have -- maximize the use, if you will, of that facility and to make sure that we make it as safe as possible, not only for the inmates, but the people who work there. >> so, we hear the question and, yes, we will consider that as we move forward, particularly a broader look at the sheriff's facilities as a whole. >> okay. and, mr. strong, i have -- maybe this is for you or sheriff mirkarimi. but in terms of -- do you have a reaction to the report the budget and legislative analyst report that essentially talks about how the number of beds

should not be 640, but 384? >> you know, i don't have and i don't know if kyle at the controller's office has any additional response. i mean, we're -- we look at this as a long-term big capital project. we want to make sure we get it -- you know, we get it as close to right as we can. we think it's prudent that we're going to have a couple more opportunities when we do the e-i-r, we're going to have some alternates so that if it is smaller then we can build a smaller jail. we also don't want to preclude, you know, something from happening where we may need a little -- where it could be bigger. but i do think that this is going to come back. and before these items go to the board, they also come to the capital planning committee and i can assure you we've had a number of discussions about cj2 and about these issues. [speaker not understood]. >> sheriff, did you want to add to that? >> kyle, sheriff? >> sorry. i certainly want to invite the controller's office, too.

but real quickly, the notion that the unused, which is like an empty costco facility type facility, pop-up tent in san bruno of of county jail number 6 ~ can easily be converted is false. it's completely false. in fact, i think it's always been a bit of a hanging chad, for lack of a better phrase. it should have been dee commissioned and de rated quite sometime ago. it was designed simply to deal with the overflow and over crowding. so, the analysis that you're just asking about takes in consideration the redistribution of a much smaller facility in downtown san francisco that the budget analyst had concluded with shared by other remodeling down in san bruno. bottom line for me is philosophically, i think we should not be suburbanizing our jail population. i think we should be urbanizing it because i think it's more consistent with our values of

effective rehabilitation and reentry. and maybe the controller may want to weigh in. >> thank you. >> i just wanted to add that the budget and legislative analyst's report forecast is actually quite similar to ours. you mentioned that they said you could build a jail of 384 beds, but their range is somewhere around the same as ours, somewhere 390 to 550 something, around that range and our forecast was 400 to 600. so, they're very close to each other. but one important thing i think to keep in mind when we're planning for this is that, yes, it would be a waste to build more beds than we need, but also there is a potential cost if we don't build enough beds and overcrowding should be very expensive and could lead to inhumane incarceration for some folks, too. thank you. >> so said, final question, do we have any outstanding debt right now, mr. strong, in terms of financing for existing jails? >> yeah, i mean -- and i'll ask nadia to come up here.

she's much more qualified to talk about that than i am. >> good afternoon, supervisors. nadia [speaker not understood], controller's office of public finance. yes, we do have some cops outstanding currently on the san bruno jail of approximately $117 million. >> great. why don't we now turn to -- i know there are a number of folks who are here to respond, to also provide their comments to the report. and if i may begin by asking our chief of probation officer wendy stills to please come on up. thank you, chief, for your patience and for being here. >> my pleasure. thank you very much for having me here today. in addition to being the chief of adult probation, i almost am partner of the [speaker not understood], and ab 78 and ab 109, that partnership was

created to look at alternatives to incarceration trying to assist with reducing the state prison population issues. and, so, my comments are from that. but i also am the definitive pointed board member to the california rehabilitation oversight board which deals with the prison population. so, i'm also speaking from that. there are a lot of moving parts, as you've already heard. and i first want to thank the board for giving me the opportunity to be here to provide input. and i also really want to compliment harvey rose's office, the board's analyst and specifically ms. campbell also. i think that me did an excellent job ~. everybody knows me. we've had our differences of opinion with the board's analyst sometimes, but they just did an excellent job on this. >> harvey rose is pleased to hear that, i think. >> yes. just remember that at budget time, right? [laughter] >> but in all seriousness, what they came up with, there are a lot of unknowns. and ultimately the recommendation was we think

that there is a need for a lesser amount, but we have time, right? there is this environmental process that we're going to go through. and while we go through that, that's going to take at least a year, it's going to give us an opportunity to understand what some of these moving parts are really going to mean to the system. before i get into those moving parts, i also want to recap the progress that san francisco has made, and we are truly seen as a progressive leader. probation in san francisco won the 2013 american probation and parole association's award for that, being that progressive community corrections leader. we also just last week hit the high performance, one of only 10 counties in the state to hit high performance under sb678. that's preventing probation failures in state prison. that's one part of the equation. the other part of that equation is we had a 75% successful probation completion rate. so, we have to look at all of them together. with that said, post realignment, we have had --

we're at historic lows. 40 year historic low in the jail population. that's significant. we have also reduced the overall jail population about or prison population, excuse me, to probation by about 25%. i'm supervising in total 25% less people than i did pre-alignment. that's pretty amazing when we had about 800 people realigned to our community supervision. with great success rates. with that, there's no doubt that there are challenges to realignment. the population that we're getting from the prison system, 50% of them, 8 or more prior felony convictions and 25%, 11 or more. they have serious needs. so what's going to affect -- even though san francisco is invested in evidence based practices and we are producing great results, we are assessed by the criminal [speaker not understood] needs but we're changing the way we supervise risk and needs and that's helping basically produce the

results. but we've also invested in a significant amount of services which that's really what we're talking about. if we're talking about alternatives, it's programming. it's assessing not only what the risk and needs of the individual, but then having the services out in the community to address those needs. in addition to that, we also -- the court system, the expansive system of collaborative courts we have created in san francisco, [speaker not understood], courts designed instead of failures to state prison and creating a reentry court, we created a pre-entry court which is a prevention of failures to state prison and prevention of additional victimization. victimization is a high priority to us with 5400 individuals that we supervise, there are individuals at the end of those other felony sentences. in addition to that, though, we have been working very closely with the justice reinvest initiative from the federal level and they've come in and

some of the things that have been mentioned today is looking from a data-driven analysis at reducing the racial disparities in san francisco's criminal justice system, shortening standard probation term to two years instead of 3 and that's really important if we're looking at success. how are we using our resources and then in addition to that expanding pretrial alternatives. and that's significant when 70, 80% of the population that's in jail is pretrial, pre-sentence. and all these strategies would allow san francisco to avoid millions of dollars of cost that could be invested in supportive housing for individuals in other mental health type services, forensics court out in the community. with that said, i am by no means advocating that we don't need a new jail. what i'm saying is, you know, we've got two years under our belt with realignment and another third year total with sb678, evidence-based probation supervision and we know these

strategies are working. but on the other side of the coin we are awaiting a decision from the federal court, the state -- the governor and the legislature could not come to agreement with the plaintiff in the actual part of the state litigation, they are going to have to reduce their population by 10,000 beds. how they do that has the potential to impact every county. in addition to that, part of what the governor's budget also includes, which we won't know ultimately what's going to happen with that until they finish the budget process, but it includes giving additional sentence credits to those that are considered now 20%ers increasing their sentence credit to 33%. also giving milestone credits to the same population. and another litigation decision, the butler decision is basically going to now force courts to instead of giving 15 years to life with an open-ended sentence when that individual would get out, they'll have to go on record as to what that release date will be. and the only thing that can impact that date would be the

in-prison behavior, positive or negative, which also everyone that is in prison right now that has one of those 15, 20-year to life or what have you, they have to by court order be taken back to the board's hearing and decisions being rendered. there are other strategies that have the potential and have, probation has implemented with the court three-day reports. motion to revoke, and what that means is instead of having somebody sit in jail for 21 days while we did a board report, we've shortened that down to three days. well, that saves the difference between 3 jail bed days and 18 jail bed days. you know, then you do the math. that equates to a lot of adp. but again i guess i want to circle all the way back around to say san francisco has done a fantastic job with realignment. i think the questions that have been asked and the issues, the moving parts that are unknown right now really needs to have some time to play out. the environmental aspect of

having that report then gives us a year to relook at that. and i completely support the board's analyst recommendation to let that time go. let's take a look and get some of these answers, and then see and make a better decision a little bit further down the road. >> thank you very much, chief. and i know that we have our public defender in the audience as well. i want to thank public defender adachi for his patience. thank you for being here and thank you for your report. >> thank you very much and good afternoon. my office provides legal representation to over 20,000 people every year. about 80% of the people who are in custody are our clients. they're not just there just to sit and wait in due time, but they're there to get justice through the courts. and that's why i do believe that it's important that we

have a facility that is close to the courthouse. and i'm not in favor of having all of the pretrial prisoners housed at san bruno. for many years the prison population or jail population in san bruno was limited to post conviction or people who are post sentence. and we rarely had a client that we had to go out and see at san bruno unless it was the same situation. now it's very common. i know we have clients at san bruno. and, so, our attorneys have to travel back and forth and it's a good 25, 30-minute drive out there at times. and, again, i think important for our attorneys to have access to our clients. and it's also important for the families to have access to the clients. that being said, from the revised forecast based on the

2013 data, the number that they're estimating is between 1,6 26 and 1,7 88 ~ as we have heard. now, if they close county jail 3 and 4 all together, the remaining capacity of the rated jail beds would be 1,53 2. as of today and i checked this morning, ~ they're 1,315 people in custody. so, that's actually 200 less than the capacity of rated jail beds if we close county jail 3 and 4. but even using that higher forecast, san francisco would have to come up with alternatives to house under the moderate number 94 people in custody and at the more conservative number, 256. and, so, i do not believe that this small number justifies building a replacement jail and

a $1 billion price tag. now, there are a couple things that mr. rose mentions in his report that i think bear noting. one is the fact is that we have an excellent pretrial diversion program. this is a program that's created under statute, but it's unique to san francisco and a few other counties that has an extensive pretrial diversion program. according to the report, there are 1,127 participants and for people who don't know what pretrial diversion is, it's for low-level misdemeanors. and instead of going to jail or facing trial, a person can elect to do community service, some kind of restorative justice solution. and the advantage is not only [speaker not understood] conviction for employment purposes going forward, but it also allows you to have a clean record. and, so, you don't have a record that is going to be an obstacle to employment. and mr. rose found that even

given the existing program, 60 more people could be diverted or released from county jail if the district attorney and the sheriff successfully implement new programs or policies that would result in more cases going on pretrial diversion. really all who cited extensively in the report has been pretrial diversions with the founder of the program, it's been over 30-year, it's a tremendous job. i believe that that program can and should be expanded to include more cases and more programs and not fewer. the cost of pretrial diversion is fractional what it costs to keep people in custody. also note that there is nothing in the report about how the sheriff's funding that is receiving through realignment and under the uses of alternative incarceration like electronic monitoring and home detention, those things are not mentioned in the report and i'm

sure that the sheriff probably has more information on that. as the police chief mentioned earlier, from what we've seen, the decrease in the inmate population has been driven primarily by decrease in the number of arrests mostly in drug cases. and we think that this is a good thing. more people are going into treatment. the diversion programs that we have for drug treatment are being utilized. the behavioral health court, the mental health court is doing very well. and, so, we will continue those things. but again, these are programs that could be expanded. and we just need to put our heads together and figure out how we can change some of the criteria of these programs. for example, our behavioral health court only serves individuals who have a san francisco address. we had a situation earlier this year where a person who was obviously very mentally ill gave an out of county address. and for that reason was

released and was not able to participate in the behavior health court which would have resulted in a better long-term result. we've seen a 28% decrease in the number of jail bookings, 32% decrease in the number of new criminal filings. we expect this to continue. and, again, looking at the number of individuals in jail today, we could close county jails 3 and 4 and we would still be fine. one issue that i wanted to mention that i think went counter to everything that we're doing is bail. most people are in jail today because they're poor. you could be accused of murder and get out of jail as longs as you have a million dollars to post for bail. you can be in jail for trespassing and because you

don't have $50 or $500 to post your bail, you're going to be in jail. and, so, the way that the bail works now is that the courts and the judges, they meet every year, they figure out what the bail should be. that's how the state law allows the setting of bail and each county sets their own bails. recently the court announced a new bail schedule which dramatically increased bails by thousands of dollars. so, this is something that we really need to look at. if we follow the lead of states like maryland that have reformed their bail schedules, they look at factors such as, you know, length of time in the area, your criminal arrest record, all those kinds of things to figure out whether a person should be released. it is not simply based on how much money you have. i just have a couple of questions that i wanted to ask

be addressed in any future reports. if you're asking what my position is, there needs to be a jail facility near 850 bryant road, where the hall of justice is. does it have to be a new facility? the answer is no. the question i have is has the sheriff commissioned a study into looking -- into converting a portion of county jail 1 to build rated beds. what we were told is county jail number 1, that's the book and release facility, right? so, it has a holding capacity of 2 98. and then county jail number 2 ~ has 3 92 rated beds ~. it's a solo indication for women and it houses now both men and women. so, the question is, you know, can we take some of the beds that are in the holding capacity to build rated beds. and do we need the entire 2 98 capacity ~ to cover people who

are being arrested every day. i would guess not based on the number of cases that we are seeing. if we converted nonrated beds to rated beds, that would add in and of itself 74 beds to current capacity, which would further decrease the need for replacement jail. and that would take care of the problem that we might have in even, you know, 2019, if we had 250 more people in custody. i also want to note i think having a cushion of jail beds is not a good thing because it disincentive eyeses the use of alternative to incarceration. the other thing i worry about, too, ~ if we have a bunch of empty beds the state could come in and place people in those facilities. and, of course, we would be paid for that, nonetheless, i don't think most san franciscans would favor that. obviously we need to reduce the over incarceration of african-american men and women in our jails. that's i think a priority.

my office we formed a racial justice committee to look at that issue and we're going to be coming up with some recommendations as to what we can do from our end. and, you know, i do think that if we do not have the excess beds available, the sheriff is going to be forced along as -- with the other criminal justice partners -- to use alternative site community programs and electronic monitoring. i think that would be a good thing. so, i know the controller's revised forecast remains to be seen. we're going to wait until the environmental report is going to be done. i think that's a good thing. we'll get a better sense of the trend. but i guess the big question i have is can we modify or remodel county jails 1 and 2 to address any needs that we have and then we wouldn't have to build a new jail. if we do determine we have to build a new jail, obviously it should be the smaller jail, not

the larger one. thank you. >> thank you, mr. adaji. if we could ask, sheriff, if you want to -- >> i very much appreciate the comments of the public defender. but i want to bring up my chief deputy of custody. i think there was just some misstates or misspeaking on the calculations. so... >> supervisors, good afternoon. matt freeman, chief deputy san francisco sheriff's department. it's good to see you again. as you know, the facility commanders that manage the various county jails report to me. so, i'm intimately aware of the entire san francisco county jail system. and i think it's just important to point out the public defender had referenced the fact that with the count as it is today, the sheriff's department could completely close county jails 3 and 4 and

still be just fine. and i think that that doesn't take into account what has been referred in many of the documentation has been written, we call the classification factor and the need to keep separate and segregate dispaired groups of the inmate population when you think in terms of maximum, medium, minimum security inmates. when you think in terms of gender nonconforming, inmates that need protective custody. our jail psychiatric population and others. so, to simply say it's that easy, i do not believe is an accurate statement. especially when considering the county jail facilities and their existing form which many of you had an opportunity to come and tour and see for yourself. so, to that end, it would not be possible for us to safely

house the prisonerses that are currently in the county jail right now without not simply closing the 6 and 7 floor, county jail 3 respectively, and not replacing them, and it also doesn't take into account conditions of confinement and the ability of the sheriff's department to deliver programmatic content, the ability to have classrooms as evidenced by our education corridor in county jail number 5 where the 5 keys charter high school sees to it that inmates that want the opportunity to obtain high school equivalency or their high school diploma, multi-purpose room space and vocational training space. so, i think it was important to point that out in response to that comment. >> okay, thank you, chief. if we can now hear from our district attorney. i know we have chief of staff who district attorney george bascone, christine [speaker not

understood], thank you for your patience. >> my pleasure. good afternoon, supervisor campos, supervisor yee. i'm here on behalf of district attorney george [speaker not understood]. i'll be brief. what i wanted to point out is how reassuring it is to hear from every partner we have in the criminal justice system that reducing our incarceration numbers is something we all care about. and i think that is something that distinguishes us as san franciscans. and something that we should exalt and build around. so, as we look at whether a new jail is the right path for san francisco, i think it's important to keep those values at the forefront of that conversation as have been expressed to a person, everybody that participates in this system. the district attorney obviously is the flood gate for who enters into the jails after an initial arrest, we make the determination who should be charged with a crime. we make arguments about who should be held while they're facing that charge, and we are the largest driver in addition to the courts of who remains in custody, either pre- or post

conviction. it is fortunate to have a district attorney that thinks there are other ways [speaker not understood]. incarceration is just one, but not the sole tool to do that. for that reason, in conjunction with his partners, we're at a 40-year low in our jail population and that is no small accomplishment. it has required everybody to participate toward the shared goal and we're seeing positive results from that, something the rest of the state is not experiencing. and we need to take pause and identify what trends have led us to that place and how we continue down that path. programs in the district attorney's office that have led to reduction in jail population and i think will continue to lead to such reductions, i'll name just a couple of them, but our neighborhood courts program is a free charging program where we take misdemeanor crimes and rather than charge the person with a crime, we send them to a panel of neighborhood adjudicators and the neighborhood decides how

severe the act was and what the consequence for that should be. jail can never be a answer to that he question. it's all restorative in nature ~. in just one calendar year we saw 700 cases through that process. that was a significant reduction in court time and in jail time for many of those people. in addition to that, we have implemented an alternative sentencing planner. an individual that reviews cases with the specific purpose of trying to find a sentence that will seek a crime other than jail and other than prison. and in that work we have seen tremendous results in a quick review of 30 cases that the alternative sentence planner had looked at. of the 30 the initial offer had been prison. at the end of that nobody was sent to prison. so, we see a real changes in the way our office is conducting business and how that impacts the rest of the stream in criminal justice. and beyond that in the coming year, we're looking to create a pretrial tool, an assessment tool to help us understand who needs to remain