"Last April marked the first time an outside group inspected the County Jail since 2007. The highly anticipated — and largely damning — findings made public this week criticize the amount of time inmates are placed in small, windowless “safety cells,” or “rubber rooms,” as they’re known.

“The county is a real outlier in California and nationally with this practice,” said Melinda Bird, an attorney with Disability Rights California, the state-mandated advocacy group seeking to protect the rights of inmates with mental-health disabilities. Most jails do not hold inmates in a safety cell for more than a few hours, Bird said; Disability Rights found inmates with mental illness and behavior problems were housed in safety cells for “three days at a time on a repeated basis” and that custody staff confirmed placement was “not temporary.”"