What Is Wrong With San Diego County? Children Taken From Parents Have Been Abused by Social Workers Over the Years and Local Jail Conditions Are the Worst in California

Residents of San Diego County have been subjected to two recent devastating news reports about our area.

A doctor expert says San Diego County’s jails are the worst than he’s ever seen them and are ‘far behind other jail and prison systems in California.’ The County has faced dozens of lawsuits that have cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in recent years.

And children taken from their parents for their own safety were abused by county social workers. The county is currently confronting hundreds of lawsuits filed by now-grown victims who say they were sexual assaulted at Polinsky Children’s Center and other facilities.

San Diego County might have the best weather around, but perhaps it helps hide an ugly, dark underbelly.

U-T writers Jeff McDonald and Kelly Davis recently published the following on our jail conditions:

‘No meaningful treatment’: Doctor says San Diego County jails are the worst he’s ever seen —
An expert for the plaintiffs suing over jail conditions says San Diego County’s lockups are ‘far behind other jail and prison systems in California.’

When people who rely on psychiatric medication are booked into a San Diego County jail, they are forbidden to bring their prescriptions with them, leaving them to decompensate as they go days or weeks without treatment. When a person in jail expresses a desire to self-harm, they are stripped naked, put in a safety cell and forced to defecate and urinate into a metal grate. The conditions in these cells are so harsh that people lie about being suicidal to avoid them.

In San Diego jails, decisions that affect mentally ill people are regularly made by command staff rather than healthcare professionals — a practice that can jeopardize the well-being of people behind bars. These and other findings are the conclusions of Dr. Pablo Stewart, a correctional healthcare expert, who spent three days early last year touring San Diego County jails and interviewing staff and those in custody in preparing a report for attorneys suing to force reforms.

Stewart’s conclusions echo those from a number of outside experts in recent years, including experts hired by the Sheriff’s Office, who recommended a series of reforms to improve the treatment of people in county jails. Several of the studies, audits and court filings reference reporting in “Dying Behind Bars,” a six-month investigation published by The San Diego Union-Tribune in 2019.

“On the matter of imposing discipline for people with mental health needs and/ or intellectual disabilities, San Diego County jail is far behind other jail and prison systems in California,” Stewart wrote in the 165-page analysis, dated last August but only recently released publicly.

The San Diego County jail system — where more than 240 people have died since 2006 — is an outlier among other California counties, Stewart found.

“In my more than 35 years evaluating and working in detention facilities, I have come across very few, if any, mental health care systems so lacking in effective systems and levels of care,” he wrote.

The failed practices have led to dozens of lawsuits and cost taxpayers tens of millions of dollars in recent years.

More troubling, Stewart said, is that Sheriff Kelly Martinez and her predecessor, former Sheriff Bill Gore, have known about the deficiencies but have resisted adopting recommended reforms, including those made by their own consultants.

“A well-functioning jail mental health care system requires effective coordination across all staff and health care disciplines,” he wrote. “San Diego County jail is, in several respects, uniquely dysfunctional in this regard.”

[For the balance of this article, go here.]

And then Jeff McDonald published this on Sunday:

They were taken from their parents for their own safety. Then county social workers abused them, they say.
San Diego County is confronting hundreds of lawsuits filed by now-grown victims who say they were sexual assaulted at Polinsky Children’s Center and other facilities.

They were the children of domestic violence, parents haunted by drug addiction and other traumas, taken from their homes by social workers convinced that they would be safer in the custody of San Diego County than with their own parents. But in case after case, boys and girls were sexually abused by people charged with protecting them, according to a spate of new lawsuits filed against San Diego County.

Some of them were drugged to keep them vulnerable, and easy to molest, the plaintiffs say. In addition to repeated sexual assaults, others say they suffered physical and verbal abuse by social workers at the Polinsky Children’s Center. Many of those who reported the abuse over the course of decades — including some abused by dozens of perpetrators — were told to be quiet or simply disregarded, the lawyers and lawsuits allege.

“Based on our investigation, the County of San Diego was apparently one of the largest employers of child molesters in the state of California,” said attorney Blake Woodhall, who represents scores of alleged victims. “Many children reported to the staff and administration that they were being sexually abused while they were at Polinsky,” he said. “Others pleaded for help but were completely ignored or dismissed.”

The alleged abuses happened decades ago, mostly in the 1990s and early 2000s. But the cases have been piling up in San Diego County and elsewhere since lawmakers in 2019 passed the California Child Victims Act, legislation by then-Assemblymember Lorena Gonzalez that rewrote the statute of limitations for people who were abused by institutions as minors.

County officials are being inundated with lawsuit after lawsuit alleging heinous behavior by social workers — men and women accused of sexually exploiting children as young as 8 years old.

Earlier this year, The San Diego Union-Tribune reported that the county already faced dozens of lawsuits involving its Probation Department, which runs the region’s two facilities that house boys and girls ordered into custody by the juvenile justice system.

But San Diego County is also facing at least 100 additional lawsuits filed by now-grown victims who say they were assaulted while under the supervision of the Health and Human Services Agency, which is responsible for protecting children removed from their home. The cases amount to a tidal wave of litigation that could ultimately cost San Diego County $100 million or more. In a settlement of similar claims reached last month in Los Angeles County, officials agreed to pay billions of dollars to resolve thousands of accusations.

[For the balance of this article, go here.]

We don’t have any answers but understand that residents of our beautiful county need to know and acknowledge this dark underbelly of our area. Sure, the accusations are based on past and present law suits, but law suits don’t materialize out of thin air. They definitely reflect a troubling reality about San Diego.