The Third Floor of the Jail Has Reopened But Problems Persist
The Sheriff’s Office has implemented a temporary staffing fix but there are ongoing barriers to retention, including the jail’s outdated design.
The Shasta County jail fully reopened its 3rd floor on November 26, 2023. It had been closed since July 2022, in response to a critical staffing shortage. Since then, the jail, which has a total capacity of 484 beds, has been operating at about 75% capacity.
Timothy Mapes, the Public Information Officer for the Sheriff’s Office, told Shasta Scout this week that while two new deputies have recently started their jail training programs, the ability to reopen has mostly been a result of increased staffing in other divisions that has allowed the Sheriff’s Office to temporarily re-assign staff to the jail to bolster staffing levels.
Doing so, Mapes said, will immediately address mandatory overtime and workload concerns at the jail in a way that the agency hopes will improve retention over time. That’s important because four more new deputies are scheduled to be sworn in by mid-December.
Staffing is only one of the obstacles in the way of a fully functional county facility, according to elected Sheriff Michael Johnson, who manages the jail.
In a recent presentation to the county board, Johnson said capacity issues at the jail include not only staff recruitment and retention issues caused by low morale and low pay but deficits in the jail’s design. Those design limitations, he said, impact capacity for both appropriate inmate segregation and the programming needed to respond to longer-term inmate stays due to changes in state legislation.
Sheriff Johnson has advocated for building a new jail facility with 800 beds, but he faces ongoing opposition from county board supervisors who feel such a facility is too costly to consider. It’s not clear how many more beds would be needed to meet Shasta County’s needs. Assessing jail bed needs is a complex topic that has not been conducted in the county since 2018.
Mapes said the Sheriff’s Office will continue to work with the county on long-term plans to resolve jail issues related to facility design, staffing, and programming.
Annelise Pierce contributed to this article.
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It is far more important for the Sheriff to increase resources in all the Communities in Shasta County outside of city jurisdictions due to increasing crime in neighborhoods, not in the jail. Currently, reporting crime often results in no response or a response hours later when there is little chance left to catch perpetrators. The new crime is property crime, break-ins, vehicle theft, squatters, abandoned vehicles, in addition to the rest of the crime spectrum. The County jail has worked for many years, and spending time in jail carries risks, just like life in general. This is not an excuse for poor police work, if that happens. However, the same pro-crime agenda in the Bay Area is creeping north and it places unreasonable demands and costs on Shasta County residents. I do not support such a strategy that intends to make jail too expensive so that criminals are instead just left on the streets of Shasta County. A stay in jail should not be overly pleasant and repeat stays should be discouraged.
I have a male friend in there and there is sewage backing up and spilling out into pods from the top floor going down “like a waterfall” and coming up from the floor drains for the second time in 2 weeks and this is on top of influx of more people, inmates are having to do the cleanup without proper sterile protection and that is just disgusting and inhumane. People are going to start getting sick. They REALLY need to address these issues especially as being understaffed leads to low officer morale but living with nasty sewage ick is not going to make for inmates having good morale either and things are surely going to escalate. Jail does not need to be a 5 star hotel but at the same times human beings serving time or waiting for trial do deserve to be treated with dignity and be in a clean environment. The more content they are the more cooperative they will be and easier things will be for everybody involved!! I hope that someone in media covers this!