By Kelly Davis / SD Union-Tribune/ January 13, 2025
San Diego County Sheriff’s Office policy requires weekly sanitation and hygiene inspections at its jails, but a report by an environmental health specialist, hired by attorneys suing over jail conditions, questions whether that policy is being followed.
“Based on the conditions observed during my inspections, it is doubtful if meaningful sanitation and hygiene inspections are occurring,” Debra Graham wrote in her Aug. 7 report.
Graham toured six of the county’s seven jails last January and May, concluding that the Sheriff’s Office “fails to meet minimum environmental health and safety standards in their jail facilities.”
“It is perplexing to me how such filthy conditions can accumulate and continue without active intervention and corrective measures when deplorable conditions in some areas are so obvious,” she wrote.
The report was the first of 12 the attorneys plan to make public as part of a broader class-action lawsuit seeking to require the Sheriff’s Office to improve jail conditions and provide better care for mentally ill and otherwise disabled men and women in custody.
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My cynical side says the jail managers don’t care; to them, this is all part of a deterrence scheme. ‘Make jails as bad as they can get away with in order to deter and punish.’