Quick Take
Santa Cruz County is facing heat for keeping a pandemic pause on contact visitation for jail inmates and their families. County supervisors promise action, but advocates say this continued lack of contact visits has a traumatizing effect on children.
When the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a new reality of social distancing, many in-person interactions long taken for granted went remote, including in-person contact visits between many Santa Cruz County Jail inmates and their families.
Those visits have still not returned. Local officials blame recruitment and retention issues at the Santa Cruz County Sheriff’s Office that reflect broader hiring struggles in the regional public sector. Local groups focusing on criminal and racial justice say the county has failed not just jail inmates — many of whom are still awaiting trial and legally innocent — but more specifically the children of inmates, contributing to a dangerous cycle of trauma. Lookout’s editorial board focused on these concerns in a recent editorial.
The county’s board of supervisors will host a pair of budget hearings this week, on Tuesday and Wednesday, and local leaders said they plan to raise the issue directly to the sheriff. Lt. Patrick Dimick told Lookout the sheriff’s office was declining any interviews until next week.
“At the budget hearings, I am going to ask the sheriff about the issue of contact visits,” District 3 County Supervisor Justin Cummings said. “I want to know whether it’s really a budget issue, or a staffing issue. My position is that I am supportive of going back to contact visits.”
However, Cummings questioned the supervisors’ ability to be a force for change in this area since the sheriff is directly elected by the voters and is not accountable to the will of supervisors: “It’s up to [Sheriff Jim Hart] and his department to move things forward.”
Pre-pandemic, the county’s lower-security jail facilities at Rountree in Watsonville and Blaine Street in Santa Cruz allowed for contact visits, creating a space for inmates to hold their children and loved ones, which studies show has a significant and positive emotional impact on both parent and child. The county jail’s main and largest facility does not allow contact visits due to security concerns, but local groups are pushing to change that.
Lynn Petrovic, a member of the county’s Commission on Justice and Gender, which focuses on improving the lives of women in the local jail system, said failure to bring back contact visits further harms a generation of children who have already lost a parent to the justice system. The commission has pushed for the sheriff and the supervisors to take up the issue, but Petrovic said there was a concern that it had fallen on deaf ears, until now.
“We were beginning to lose hope that this would ever move,” Petrovic told Lookout. Petrovic, who also serves as executive director of the local chapter for Court Appointed Special Advocates (CASA) for Children, acknowledged that the supervisors don’t oversee the sheriff. However, she said she believes strong messaging from them could make a meaningful impact.
“What I want from the supervisors is to say that this is unacceptable and to hold people accountable for changing it,” Petrovic said. “We need to provide what our children need. When we don’t act as responsible adults, when we don’t provide what children in our community need and instead expose them to trauma, we are damaging their chances for a future.”
District 1 County Supervisor Manu Koenig said via text that the sheriff’s office would need to add “two-to-four additional mandatory overtime shifts to make contact visits possible” today. He said the staffing shortages at the county jail means the issue of children not seeing their parents “really cuts both ways” since correctional officers are having to commute long distances and work overtime. Still, Koenig committed to working with the sheriff to find a fix.
“I will work with the sheriff’s office to get a staffing plan in place for monthly contact visits,” Koenig said. The supervisor then pointed to the housing crisis as central to the staffing shortages, and said the county needed to work harder to provide more middle-class housing options in order to retain a strong local workforce.
Pamela Sexton, a member of the local chapter of collective Showing Up for Racial Justice, pointed to a resolution passed by the board of supervisors in 2019 regarding a bill of rights for children of incarcerated parents. She said the county’s political officials have already determined contact visits to be a priority and that the county needed to bring them back.
“We know better, we know it can happen, and we know how to do it,” Sexton said. “It’s important for parents, but it’s so important for the children. The children are really the invisible victims here.”
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