Media Coverage

Two members of the county Board of Supervisors are calling for a review of best practices within county jails in the wake of a six-month investigation by The San Diego Union-Tribune into the growing number of inmate deaths.

The end for George Gallegos came on April 21, 2018, when the 55-year-old inmate succumbed to acute pneumonia and severe dehydration while locked up in the San Diego Central Jail. Three months earlier, Gallegos had been a patient at Metropolitan State Hospital, a psychiatric facility in Los Angeles.

When it comes to calculating the suicide rate of jail inmates, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department prefers a different approach than one widely used by experts, oversight groups and federal agencies such as the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The report Friday in The San Diego Union-Tribune about the unusually high rate of inmate deaths in county jails depicts a Sheriff’s Department that knows it has a problem but can’t stop it. Since 2009, the year Bill Gore became sheriff, 140 inmates have died — from poor health, suicide, overdoses and homicide. One hundred fifteen were awaiting trial.

More than 130 people have died in San Diego County jails since 2009, the year Bill Gore took over as sheriff. That’s an average higher than one inmate per month, every month, over the past 10 years

More than two years after an independent audit raised alarm bells about special-ed classes, youth advocacy groups don’t see change coming without legal action

Stephen’s teachers started sending him to the separate room when he was in first grade.

Now 10, Stephen has been diagnosed with autism and anxiety. His mom said that when he got frustrated and behaved in ways teachers found disruptive – breaking pencils, blurting out or crumpling paper – educators swiftly removed him from the classroom, sending him to a room where he would sit the rest of the day without access to school work.

There is an anonymous mass grave at the Russian River Cemetary in Ukiah, for the unclaimed remains of patients who died at the Mendocino State Hospital in Talmage, which was open from 1893 to 1972. Monday was the 17th annual Remembrance Day Ceremony for the unknown number of people buried all across California, some in mass graves like the one in Ukiah, and some in small neglected cemetaries.

On Tuesday, four advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Sacramento City Unified School District of running “an unlawful school system that results in modern-day segregation and mistreatment of students with disabilities, particularly Black students with disabilities.”

he Sacramento City Unified School District was hit with a lawsuit filed by advocacy groups over allegations that the school district is discriminated against students with disabilities. According to the suit, the district “segregates students with disabilities and denies them the opportunity to be educated alongside their peers.”