Are abuses still occurring at SLO County Jail? Sheriff Parkinson owes the public some answers

More than three years after mentally ill inmate Andrew Holland died after being strapped in a restraint chair for 46 hours, the San Luis Obispo County Sheriff’s Office would have us believe that most problems at the County Jail have been resolved.

A recent report from the U.S. Department of Justice says otherwise.

It’s disturbing reading that raises serious questions about what’s going on behind the locked doors of the County Jail. If you have an hour or two, we highly recommend you read the report for yourself.

It includes numerous examples of inmates whose serious medical and mental health conditions have been mismanaged or even ignored; lack of supervision of suicidal inmates; and most concerning of all, use of excessive force by jailers.

The report lists 65 “minimum remedial measures” needed to resolve “constitutional and statutory violations” identified in the report.

If the county fails to implement them, it risks being sued by the U.S. attorney general, though in a cover letter accompanying the report, the DOJ writes that it hopes to resolve the matter “through a more cooperative approach.”

In an email to The Tribune, Assistant County Counsel Nina Negranti wrote that her office is reviewing the report.

“We anticipate reaching agreement short of litigation,” she wrote.

Sheriff Ian Parkinson, who spearheaded jail reforms after Holland’s death in January 2017, issued a news release that essentially says many of the problems raised in the report already have been addressed.

“The report fails to take into account the many remedial measures undertaken by the Sheriff’s Office since 2018 when the investigation began,” the news release says.

It also says that allegations of inappropriate force have been investigated and, if the complaints were upheld, disciplinary action, “up to and including termination,” has been taken.

It is true that many of the statistics and examples cited in the DOJ report date back to 2019 — the same year the agency made three site visits to the jail.

Also, the DOJ may well have “cherry picked” the most egregious examples to make its case.

The document does, however, acknowledge that the jail has made some changes, but it says they are “inadequate to protect prisoners from the harms identified.”

Here are just a few of the many issues the DOJ raises:

Inadequate medical care

According to the report, inmates a subjected to substantial risk as a result of inadequate medical care. For example:

• All inmates are supposed to be screened for medical issues within 14 days of admission. “But in practice, prisoners are routinely examined after the 14-day mark, or not at all,” the report says.
• Some patients with pre-existing conditions, including HIV, heart disease, high blood pressure and severe arthritis, aren’t given proper medications or devices. For instance, asthma patients are not allowed to keep their inhalers with them.
• Pregnant women aren’t give adequate treatment; the report cites one example of a high-risk patient who was not examined until a month after admission. She ultimately suffered a miscarriage.
• Medical appointments are often delayed or canceled; for example, out of 196 eye appointments scheduled from March to June 2019, only 27 occurred.

Inadequate mental health treatment

The report says inmates do not receive proper care for mental health issues.

Again, the DOJ found a lack of proper screening, poor medication management, and lack of follow-up for inmates with serious mental issues.

“Wellpath (the company under contract to provide medical services at the jail) in fact seems to discourage routine follow-up mental health care,” the report says.

It cites inadequate staffing among the problems. “As first observed in August 2019 and confirmed as recently as March 2021, the jail has just three LMFTs (licensed marriage and family therapists) on staff, which was not enough to meet the needs of the prisoner population.”

The report also says suicidal inmates aren’t adequately supervised and that some mentally ill inmates are kept in isolation, which is “especially harmful to prisoners who have serious mental illness.”

“The jail’s failure to take adequate steps to eliminate these risks evinces deliberate indifference to prisoner health and safety,” the report concludes.

Unnecessary use of force

The report says staff sometimes uses force when not needed, or a greater-degree of force than necessary. It cites three examples — all from 2018 — of inmate mistreatment.

In one case, an inmate was pushed headfirst into a wall. According to the report, a deputy later lied about the incident.

In another, deputies cuffed a man’s hands behind his back and dragged him at least 30 feet to a wheelchair. “There was no documented reason for staff’s failure to bring him his wheelchair instead of dragging him to the chair,” the report says.

It also alleges that deputies “appear to use Tasers in ways that created or increase risk of harm to prisoners”; use the WRAP — a soft restraint device — unnecessarily; and said at times the “sheer number” of staff involved in “takedowns” puts prisoners at risk.

What’s next?

The report raises dozens of questions that require answers far beyond the scant information the Sheriff’s Office has provided in its news release.

And it’s not just the Sheriff’s Office that should be held accountable for explaining exactly what is going on.

It’s also Wellpath, which was hired in December 2018 under the assumption that it would provide improved patient care.

According to the DOJ, that hasn’t been the case, and the report says bluntly: “... Medical care under Wellpath has not significantly improved.”

Wellpath disagrees. Like the Sheriff’s Office, it also says the DOJ findings are no longer accurate.

“This report covers a period when the county was transitioning from county-provided care to Wellpath and does not reflect care currently provided in SLO. Wellpath has worked closely with the SLO Sheriff’s Office to improve patient care, and we are confident that working together we have done just that,” the company said in an email to The Tribune.

The DOJ doesn’t confine itself to specific policies and procedures. It also questions whether the organizational structure is working.

“There is no mechanism for the county to remedy deficiencies in Wellpath’s care; any limited oversight the county does have is ad hoc and not systemic,” the report states.

Again, Wellpath disagrees: “Our contract includes clear language that, while the chief medical officer (CMO) ‘has no direct patient care responsibilities,’ the CMO ‘shall provide contract management and oversight’ to Wellpath. In effect, the county and CMO delegate day-to-day patient care responsibility to Wellpath, but we provide care under their oversight and consistent with their objectives.”

We hope that’s the case, because the county should be running the show, especially given the extensive media coverage of problems that have occurred elsewhere under Wellpath’s watch.

A CNN investigation of Wellpath published in 2019 came to this conclusion: “... Internal documents and emails, medical records, autopsy reports, audits, interviews with more than 50 current and former employees and scathing correspondence from government clients show that amid a focus on “cost containment” and massive corporate growth, the company has provided substandard care that has led to deaths and other serious outcomes that could have been avoided. CNN’s investigation looked at complaints and problems at nearly 120 locations in 32 states.”

Wellpath has denied such allegations.

Ultimately it’s the Sheriff’s Office — not Wellpath — that’s responsible for operations at the County Jail.

As taxpayers who fund that jail, we deserve full transparency that goes beyond carefully assembled news releases.

We should know what’s happening now — not two or three years ago — and if there are problems, the sheriff must tell us how they will be resolved.

Given the possibility of litigation, it’s understandable that county officials would not want to show their hand at this point, but when this is resolved — hopefully without the need for litigation — it’s time to demand a full accounting.

We saw what happened to Andrew Holland. We owe it to him and to others who have been deprived off their rights in the County Jail to do all in our power to ensure inmates are treated humanely from here on out.