Harm Reduction in San Francisco Jails

Sheriff Michael Hennessey

In the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department, the concept of harm reduction is employed in the administration of the county jails in three distinct fashions: providing freedom from physical harm for people in custody; providing rehabilitative programs for prisoners that address addiction, violent behavior and educational deficiencies; and providing post-release employment and educational opportunities for those released from our jails.

We believe that by thinking in terms of harm reduction inside the jails, we are also reducing harm to the community, as the ex-offenders who return to live in the community are less likely to commit new crimes. San Francisco has one of the largest county jail systems in the country. Our daily prisoner population is about 2,000, but we have over 45,000 admissions per year. One of the most difficult tasks facing the department is keeping people safe from harm while they are in our custody. Key to this goal is a sophisticated prisoner classification system, which begins the minute an arrestee enters our system. Each new admission receives personal interviews from both medical personnel and deputy sheriffs. The information gleaned in these interviews is augmented by computerized criminal justice record checks. Among the important factors considered: prior prison experience or lack thereof; suicide attempts or other mental health issues; matters of physical health or disability; any history of escape or escape attempts; current or past charges of violence; and issues of sexual identity that could lead to vulnerability.   After we distill this information, a housing or placement decision is made with the goal of grouping prisoners with similar levels of sophistication or special housing needs. Ideally, the jail system would have sufficient single-cell housing to allow the classification system to work to its maximum potential. While our jails lack sufficient single-cell housing, our classification system has resulted in our jails being far below the national average in incidence of prisoner assaults, suicides and sexual batteries.

Even though the state of California has only this year added the word “rehabilitation” to the title of its prison system, now calling it the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department has for the past 30 years consistently emphasized rehabilitation programs as the goal of incarceration. While our focus has traditionally been on incustody programs, we have recently greatly expanded our post-release programs by opening an innovative and unique charter high school for prisoners and ex-offenders.  The demographics of the county jail are the demographics of poverty and addiction. It should be of no surprise to learn that most people in the San Francisco jails are substance abusers. For more than 45 percent of the prisoner population, the most serious criminal charge faced is a drug charge. Many other prisoners are in custody for theft crimes, such as burglary, auto theft, petty theft, etc., which are related to their drug and alcohol dependencies. And about one fourth of the jail population faces serious felony charges for crimes of violence.  The overwhelming majority of our local prisoners were unemployed for a significant period prior to arrest, did not graduate from high school and, although they have a bail amount set that could secure their immediate release, have no money or assets for bail.

They also share one other very important factor in common: Within a matter of weeks or months, they will all be getting out and coming back into our community.

The programs offered by the Sheriff’s Department focus on substance abuse, education, family reunification, and employment preparation. Over the years we have been fortunate to receive start-up grants from the federal government as well as from local and national foundations. We also benefit from a wealth of area agencies that provide services in the jails and that are available to provide services to prisoners upon release.

One of the most effective forms of treatment in custody is an approximation of a “therapeutic community model” within the jail. We began using this approach in 1993 with a challenge grant from the U.S.  Department of Health and Human Services to create a women’s drug treatment therapeutic community within our jail. In this model, known as the Sister Program, a group of 40 to 50 women live in a selfcontained housing unit and participate all day in drug counseling, parenting classes, basic education, life skills training, and other efforts to mirror the experience of living in a halfway house environment. Our partner in this program is Walden House, one of the nation’s most respected drug treatment programs. In fact, many of the women enter the Walden House residential program upon release from jail. A 2003 study showed significant success with this approach: Sister participants had a 28 percent recidivism rate compared to a 60 percent rate for a nontreatment control group.

After seeing the potential of the women’s drug treatment program, we expanded our efforts in 1995 to create a parallel program for men, called Roads to Recovery. Our 2003 survey of this program also shows a significant reduction in recidivism: 48 percent recidivism, compared to 60 percent in a control group, which is encouraging, but not as dramatic as with the women offenders.

In 1996 we decided to press the limits of the therapeutic community model in a jail setting and dedicate a housing unit to a program specifically for violent prisoners.  This program, called Resolve to Stop the Violence Project, or RSVP, is based on the restorative justice principle that crime hurts victims, communities and offenders and that justice should include an attempt to repair the harm that crime causes. RSVP places 60 men charged with violent crimes, or with a history of violence, in a dormitory setting where they are immersed in an intense, peer-based self-evaluation process that examines what causes a man to use violence as a form of control and communication. We emphasize three main components: offender accountability, victim restoration and community involvement.

RSVP’s motto is: Violence is learned;It can be unlearned. With the prisoners, this is achieved through five basic steps: by raising awareness of social, cultural and personal belief systems that promote violence; teaching that one has a choice as an alternative to violence; improving communication skills; creating empathy for victims and their families; and emphasizing the need to make positive contributions to the community upon release.

Survivors of violent crime play a key role in the program, too. They were part of the planning group that created the curriculum, they participate in frank dialogue with offenders every week in a session we call Victim Impact, and they receive services at a community resource center dedicated to providing direct assistance and counseling to the victims of the offenders in our program.

RSVP has become one of the most studied jail programs in the country. Dr.  James Gilligan, director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Pennsylvania, has been engaged in an evaluation of this program for the past eight years and the results are more amazing than we could have predicted. For a violent offender who participates in the program for four months, there is an 80 percent lower likelihood that he will be rearrested for a violent act when compared to a control group of similar offenders. A violent offender who spends three months in the program is 51 percent less likely to be rearrested for a violent act.  The uniqueness and success of this program was recently recognized with the 2004 Innovations in Government award by the Ash Institute at Harvard University and the Council for Excellence in Government.  Our most recent effort to change the lives of those in our custody is the creation of Five Keys Charter High School, the nation’s first in-jail charter high school.  Recognizing that fewer than one half of the prisoners we release from jail have a high school diploma, we looked for a way to get them back onto the education track and to improve their chances of obtaining gainful employment.

With the support of the San Francisco Unified School District and the San Francisco Board of Education, we created a certified charter high school that must meet the same educational standards required of every California high school. By creating a charter school, we became eligible for state funding based on our ability to maintain a stable population of prisoner-students who spend a minimum of six hours per day in approved classes. Now beginning our third school year, we have 11 full-time teachers, a principal, a registrar, a small support staff and 225 students per day. We have had 19 students graduate with full high school diplomas and hundreds more gain credits toward their graduation requirements.  Recognizing that most county jail terms are relatively brief, we have also entered into a long-term lease of a building near San Francisco’s Hall of Justice and have renovated it into a post-release continuation high school and resource center for ex-offenders. Our goal is not only to provide them with educational opportunities, but also to offer the other forms of guidance and counseling that may serve to keep them out of jail in the future.  The very name of the school, the Five Keys Charter High School, sums up our holistic approach to this form of harm reduction services. The term Five Keys is a constant reminder to our students of the areas of their lives they must address in order to stay out of the criminal justice system and build better lives for themselves: recovery, education, employment, family and community.

The Sheriff’s Department has other innovative and successful prisoner programs, such as the Garden Project, Prisoner Legal Services, mentoring, and family reunification, and the department works with local organizations, such as Goodwill, the Family Services Agency and local churches, to provide other services to prisoners and their families. With the number of prisoners we see, there are never enough services to meet the needs.

But at a time when prisons and jails are seen primarily as a place for punishment and retribution, this department takes a longer view and believes that government can do better than blindly releasing thousands of drug addicts and violent men back into society, knowing that new victims await their return. And, as we think about the limitations of our criminal justice system, we must be willing to acknowledge that when a government imprisons, a government cannot abdicate its responsibility to run safe and humane prisons. And, in fact, as we have seen here in San Francisco, it can do so much more.

Michael Hennessey has been the elected sheriff of San Francisco since 1980.