21
votes
San Francisco jails are packed for the first time in decades
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- Title
- SF led the way for justice reform. Now its jails are at capacity.
- Authors
- Jonah Owen Lamb
- Published
- Mar 14 2025
- Word count
- 885 words
Good to see San Francisco getting back to what's really important: depriving inconvenient people of their freedom.
Maybe they can volunteer them to test the safety features of autonomous cars. I bet that would help their bed shortage.
I can’t speak for all of these arrests, but what I’ve seen first hand at 16th and Mission is police breaking up the sale of stolen goods and certainly fentanyl as well. There are still homeless people on the streets around there so I don’t think it’s just about “inconvenient” people.
I think incarceration is a far more serious thing than the majority of US culture appreciates. We're far too blasé about locking people up, especially considering the evidence for its efficacy as a deterrent is spotty at best.
I'll put it another way: I believe that incarceration is in essence and in practice the most socially acceptable form of torture. Statistics suggest that its reformatory and deterrent effects are dubious, at least as practiced widely in the US. We've known this for decades, if not centuries, yet we continue to see broad cultural support for its practice. Why? I think it's because we view it solely as punitive, and that other reasoning is largely post hoc rationalization. We do it because we want to hurt the people who hurt us, either individually or as a society. We do it to inflict suffering. We do it to torture.
Thus, to my thinking the use of incarceration should always be scrutinized and criticized, even when it can't be reasonably argued that the imprisoned only committed "victimless crimes." This doesn't mean that I'm in favor of its abolition entirely; I do think there are valid reasons to incarcerate some people that go beyond our desire for punitive suffering. But I think this also means that each case should be scrutinized far more gravely than we are apt to do.
You're making an assumption that the use of incarceration didn't receive scrutiny first. San Francisco, as a very liberal part of the country, did take a very forgiving approach to crime. How do you know that the previous incarceration levels were the correct levels?
The "correct" levels are probably fundamentally unknowable, statistics being what they are. My opinion is that it should be as close to zero as we can ethically manage, so any increase is worthy of skepticism and scrutiny.
I agree that prisons need a serious reform. I don't think people deserve torture because they committed a felony. And I doubt that that's the average outcome, but it shouldn't even be a possibility.
I would like to know more about what people are getting charged with and what happens when they get in front of a judge.
Most probably aren't going in front of a judge, the vast majority of cases are settled via plea deal, because it's too expensive, your counsel isn't great*, or by the time you get through the court case you'll have been kept in jail for as long as your sentence.
*Public defenders as a whole are great and necessary and also underpaid and overworked. Often the plea deal is in the clients best interest, practically, regardless of guilt. And that's another problem with the system.
That's rich coming from you—San Francisco's best detective. How many criminals have you personally put in prison, Mr. Monk?? All you ever wanted was to be a cop (and to solve your wife's murder, I guess) and now you push back on the incarceration of criminals while neglecting to mention your own culpability in this crisis? Shame on you, Adrian. Shame on you.
I've seen cops hassling the street merchants, but whether the brand new clothes and household supplies being sold at a discount on the sidewalk are stolen is an open question. Also an open question is whether they're being targeted because of a proven crime, or because they're inconvenient to people who would like the Mission District to be a "nicer" neighborhood.
Fencing is a common crime. Retailers don't lock up stuff in many American cities for fun. They do it to limit losses in areas where shoplifting is common and isn't strictly penalized.
I'm aware that fencing is a crime. But in a just society there are steps between there being a crime on the books and shaking down people on the street purely on the suspicion of committing said crime.
Looks like you need a license to sell merchandise on the street in San Francisco. The permit only lets people sell stuff in particular locations, and the vendor has to show proof of ownership for the goods being sold.
If it's properly enforced, it seems like a pretty good workaround for allowing some street vending without allowing it get out of hand?
Not really. These are basically vagrancy laws that target the ways that poor people make money. You know how you can get arrested for homelessness in some places? It is the legal equivalent of putting bars on your benches so that no one can lay down on them and they are actually less accessible to everyone else. Aka hostile architecture.
It really doesn't solve anything and just criminalizes more behavior
It does have that vibe. It depends how it's implemented.
Update: They now have what’s essentially a police RV parked at the plaza with a dozen cops standing outside it.
I guess if they have a permanent police presence there then no one will set up shop and no one will get arrested. At least for that one spot in the city. But I don’t really know the details. Should I ask them for information next time?
Yeah, but to what end? It hasn't changed the lives of anyone it displaced so it's either just moving the problem elsewhere (best case) or exacerbating an already tenuous situation (most likely).
Presumably to the end of making the environment more pleasant for the people living in the area or traveling through the area that don't like that type of activity occurring there. No that has no consideration for the impact on the people who are displaced, but after enough time of a problem not getting resolved a better way, I can see why people would get fed up and just rather the problem be moved somewhere else that is away from them.
Definitely. But having a permanent presence there just means that the people committing the crimes will just find somewhere else to set up, especially in vulnerable neighborhoods.
I always wonder with homeless populations specifically, what would the difference be if we spent the same money per capita on housing/rehab programs rather than imprisoning them. Just to give some insight, in 2024-2025 it costs us $133,000 per person, per year to send folks to jail. Imagine if we spent that on housing programs instead.
My understanding from articles written about/by social workers in the city is that most of the people on the streets in San Francisco are refusing housing that is offered to them. I've recently seen some social workers near Mission Street talking to homeless people - I don't think I'd seen that before. As far as I can see, and by the numbers I've read, the number of people living outside is down significantly in the last few years. But the case studies show that the remaining people out there either really don't want to live inside with others or simply prefer opioid highs to warm beds.
I'd say the next move should be to remove as much fentanyl from the streets as possible to collectively ween these people off of the drug.
I have seen discussions about valid reasons why people would reasonably want to avoid shelters as they are currently designed and implemented.
You can't bring pets. You risk having everything stolen. You risk being assaulted. If it isn't freezing cold, I might make the same choice.
I feel very badly whenever I see someone lying in the street here in SF. It looks a miserable existence, but it makes me wonder how much worse it might be in a shelter.
I've always pondered about the possibility of having 'tiers' of homeless shelters.
Decently behaved, high-functioning individuals—willing to maintain hygiene, respectful and communicative with their case workers—should be diverted to shelters that offer more privacy, privileges, and comforts.
Low-functioning individuals, however, should be separated into hyper-durable, easy-to-clean shelters designed with security and surveillance in mind — essentially prison. The other month, a shelter worker in SF got shot in the face:
(833 Bryant St. is a modern and nice facility too with private rooms.)
A friend of mine, desperate for money, took a job with a temp agency. One of his temp jobs was cleaning rooms at an SRO that the city contracted as transitional housing or some shelter, I forget. He showed me photos he took at that job: the rooms were horrific. Trash piled up. Walls were smeared with... I do not want to imagine.
I think that the prospect of being mixed in with the general shelter population and being exposed to individuals who are violent and antisocial likely deters many from seeking shelter and then other services.
Incarcerating the worst of the worst offenders—the shelter workers know who they are—and removing them from the general homeless population would likely greatly improve the quality and thereby desirability of shelters and services. But right now, a general population shelter sounds like hell on earth.
What you described does not sound better than "hell on earth."
It just further dehumanizes and warehouses "undesirables." And essentially incarcerates them for their existence.
Even "willing to maintain hygiene" is an interesting standard, one many college students, houses and financially stable, don't meet on a regular basis.
What should I ask the city to do?
I don't know why you're asking me this question?
I was hoping given your consistent source of good ideas you'd have advice for me.
This reads like sarcasm to me.
Poe’s law fails me. I respect and appreciate your commentary. I’m just not always equipped to engage with it.
Gotcha.
I am not going to solve the homelessness crisis in SF. I am however anti-incarceration of homeless and mentally ill people and that was what the previous poster had proposed, regardless of it being a new "homeless only" incarceration option.
We have our own homelessness problem with far less regional wealth and far worse weather than SF and we have a number of local groups attempting to solve it, including those who build relationships with and provide street level care to people where they're at (providing propane for the winter was big). They're proposing building a tiny house encampment. Since they were supporting a tent encampment they have experience and know what they're doing.
There are any number of groups working with the homeless in SF, they probably know better than anyone what would work best for the people there. So if you seek advice for advocacy in any city, ask the people doing the work in the area. Everyone I've seen that was successful in this work treated homeless people as people with human dignity. And that, personally, is a value fundamental to my personal morality.
The plan I replied to assigned dignity only to those who acted up to a particular standard, one that many college students - some dealing with mental illness or substance abuse, but some absolutely just not caring about said standard - could not attain. It's paternalistic and such plans will keep people away from shelters even more.
That’s all fair. I get it. I never resent anyone for sleeping on the street. Those people have never caused me more than a mild inconvenience.
The opioid addicts however should have their drugs taken away. And the dangerous mentally ill should be compelled to treatment.
This is really at the heart of basically everything going on with the homeless, in that it's not really "one group". It's, at minimum 3ish groups and it being treated like 1 that can just be "solved" is why it never is.
The difference between:
oh actually now that I type that out there's probably also:
4. Someone who wound up with a criminal background.
is huge. And if you commingle these populations, guess what, they start to mix the issues. 4 is a huge point because someone starts out as "oh fuck I got injured and lost my job" and 1 year later they're probably busted on some drug/vagrancy charge and now extremely difficult to get back on their feet.
Identifying the recently homeless and the mentally disturbed would go a long way towards helping the issue. We need a better solution to housing and helping those with no one else to help them and who are unable to function.
Asylums were a fucking atrocity no doubt, but I can't help but feel like we've lost the plot when the new standard for severe mental health issues is "the door is over there, good luck".
Likewise if you could take recently homeless, screen them (yes you have X years of basic human functioning be it college or work, only recently came on hard times, and don't seem to have a crippling addiction), you could probably get better use out of all that housing that winds up a literal biohazard because of members of other groups. Give people the cushion they need to get back on their feet, and hell if needed offer relocation programs. States like NY, CA, Hawaii, and such have huge homeless issues in part because cost of living is so fucking expensive AND they're overflowing (still) with people.
Giving incentives to companies that want to support people who've recently fallen on hard times but need some low level, possibly temp to perm, work done (be it basic labor/trade work or simple office stuff like data entry) would help solve a lot of problems for both sides, and maybe get these people somewhere that they could afford to get back on their feet without having to pray they can find 6 sane roommates to split a 2 person condo with. Link it with on the job training (which i still think is a vastly better ROI than the supposed return on a 4 year degree these days) and help get these people the time they need and get them out of the system.
This leaves you with addicts, who will unfortunately NEED a major legal shift in this country, and I will continue to hold that one of the big reasons I think people are at best naive about democratic leadership, is they've had their chances to fix this and have done fuck all, and they're the only ones even paying lipservice to it usually. Treating addicts as criminals, along with the whole "you're homeless so that's also a crime", thing is just such a fucking trainwreck of a loop in our system.
It's very clear this is a different "state" than "actual legit criminal or even violent criminal" and until we treat it otherwise it will continue to be a problem. While addiction is a super tricky thing to handle in every case, it only gets harder when you throw a rap sheet on them. Obviously we should be treating addiction to the best of our ability not charging them and then shoving them back out the door because there's a 1000 other people waiting to be processed.
And of course this leaves the straight up poverty to prison pipeline that so many are already aware of, and could be its own topic and is very much intermingled with all of this.
Finally, this all comes with the HUGE caveat that these solutions, even if you agree with them, are about as far as I personally go with "utopia/best interest at heart" solutions. Point being that a lot of this stuff, even with good intentions, could turn into a NASTY fucking thing 10 years down the line with the usual bureaucratic entropy and/or corruption.
We also need a 20 year program that prevents as many people as possible from becoming homeless in the first place. Identify what problems homeless people had early in life and fix those for children today. Keep doing that for decades and you’ll eventually see results.
Yeah, but I think that's even harder, or kinda falls into my "track the recently homeless".
If you're talking "well a trouble childhood leads to homelessness",good luck. Obviously increasing social saftey nets in general would help, and stopping medical procedures from being an economic death sentence, and a million other things, but hell if you said that in the 70's they would've said "better make sure all the kids go to college"
Now that's something that has quickly become a possible contributor as these poor students get out of college and get told "well yeah you just signed up for a ton of inescapable debt, but so did everyone else, so we'll need at least a masters or some work experience to really care". I just don't know how easily you can target factors directly going that far back in a persons life.
It might be pretty cheap to pay poor and unwell parents to go to therapy. But hard to make that an effective program. There are plenty of poor people that don't end up addicted to drugs and homeless.
Could you link to some of the case studies you've seen?
This has a couple: https://sfstandard.com/2025/02/08/golden-gate-park-ranger-homelessness/
It’s also got some useful numbers in there.
California already spends tens of thousands of dollars per year on trying to house homeless people. The state simply doesn't build enough housing, and that hasn't improved. The housing supply has to grow faster than demand for housing costs to shrink. If rents went down, more people could avoid homelessness.
Many historical types of cheap, tenant housing that housed vulnerable populations were made illegal in California last century which has increased segragation. The state also adds so many restrictions on new construction that the state would need to spend massively more than $133k per person to house everyone. According to recent estimates, California spends over $1 million per "affordable" apartment since so many public sector projects in California are filled with graft and special handouts to interest groups (i.e. corruption).
Sure, but the state has already engaged in policy changes to increase building efforts and remove some of the red tape associated with new construction. Our policies are so progressive the state is getting sued right and left by nimby groups. So check mark there.
And there are many projects, in very high cost areas that are coming in far under the $1 million dollar apartment. In Santa Barbara, Dignity Moves created a 34 unit interim housing unit for $1.7 million in 2022. That's $50,000 a unit. Beyond that, even if it's a 1 million dollar investment, it isn't a per year cost, it's upfront to be able to house and move them back into normal housing over the next few decades. So it's not 1 to 1 math. For Dignity Moves they have had a 50% success rate of moving folks from the interim to their own apartment within 12 months. That's pretty impressive.
And to your insinuation of graft, if you have evidence other than a wikipedia definition of the word, I'd love to see it.
While there have been historically major problems in California getting low income housing projects and interim housing built, the state has done a pretty great job getting the ball rolling. I think the non-profit housing development, interim housing programs, and high density housing incentives would make a bigger dent in reducing the homeless population and for less money than throwing everyone in jail.
Since graft isn't a very common term, I thought it might be helpful to link a definition.
A whole lot of words have been written about the corruption in the non-profit industry in California. San Francisco is particularly bad when it comes to showering nonprofits with public money. As far as naked corruption goes, LA has a new political scandal practically every month due to how much direct influence public officials exercise over individual development projects.
https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2024/05/the-nonprofit-industrial-complex-and-the-corruption-of-the-american-city/
https://sfstandard.com/2023/05/04/nonprofits-involved-in-san-francisco-corruption-scandal-revealed-in-unsealed-filings/
https://sfstandard.com/2025/03/20/san-francisco-nonprofit-scandal-human-rights-commission-sheryl-davis-collective-impact/
https://apnews.com/article/los-angeles-councilman-charged-curren-price-f3c1ac2e7449cf21883380161c3887d6
I can't speak to whether San Francisco was paying too much to nonprofits to do things that they might theoretically have done in-house if things were different, but I can absolutely say that the taps have closed if they were ever open. There are expectations that every department may have to do with 15% less next year as a baseline in order to get the budget in order. What specific cuts are still unknown, but belt-tightening is here.
SF has lost a lot of population over the last few years. So while housing is still a big issue, finding places for these people should be a bit easier than it had been pre-pandemic.
Last I checked, San Francisco is still extremely deep in the hole when it comes to housing supply (similar to NYC). It's no wonder the YIMBY movement began there as a backlash to the BANANA NIMBYs that are so endemic to the Bay Area.
study supports cash aid for homeless people
From the article:
Although, looking at the graph, another way to put is is that the number of people in jail is about the same as just before the pandemic, and lower than any year between 1985 and 2013.
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Sounds like a very expensive housing program at $133,000 a pop. It surprising people are supportive of these efforts who cried afoul of "mismanaged funds" when California was expanding housing and turnkey programs.
That's actually extremely cheap by California standards. Recent "affordable housing" projects in California cost over $1 million per apartment. California has some serious public policy issues. The state puts up massive barriers that discourage any kind of new housing construction.
Prop 13 is California's original sin. It divided society into four classes:
Everything feels like a bandaid solution slapped on Prop 13 which made the real estate market and California's economy completely illogical.
At this point the state is being much more aggressive with its housing policy, setting significant targets for new housing in every city, and requiring them all to present plans as to how they're going to reach said targets. Much of the pushback against housing development is at the local level, with NIMBYs trying to keep everything just like it is now.
I'll believe California state policies work when the numbers start changing. After all the hoopla last year over San Francisco missing its state-mandated housing targets, a grand total of zero new homes have since been approved to start construction under the new process.
Additional reading: https://calmatters.org/housing/2025/02/california-yimby-laws-assessment-report/
Just reposting the link from our conversation above here. Interim housing for homeless folks is much cheaper. In the case of a Santa Barbara program with 34 units (with the intent of cycling through new people every 6-12 months) only cost $1.7 million to build.
Even with the associated costs per bed (~$20,000 for a year of services for similar programs) it's a much better deal. If you have it open for 10 years, with an average stay of 9 months, the 34 units alone lets you support over 450 people at a cost of around $18,500 per person (with initial construction included).
Or we can lock them up for $133,000.
Affordable apartments are different from interim housing, and that is what homeless folks need. If you can't shower, sleep, eat, or have a home address you can't get a job. Once those needs are met, 50% of the time the state doesn't need to subsidize them anymore.
Yes, it's extremely expensive compared to allowing private developers to build housing without public funds.
(I mean, cheap in terms of government funding. The buyer or renter still pays for it all.)