On the eve of Mayor Daniel Lurie’s inauguration in January, San Francisco’s three jails were nearly maxed out, with a total of 1,217 people incarcerated.
The locally incarcerated population had remained relatively stable for the previous six months, hovering just below the total number of available jail beds. Then, day by day, more beds became occupied.
Two months after inauguration day, San Francisco’s county jail population has surged by more than 10%. Depending on the day, the jails are officially over capacity, with upward of 1,300 incarcerated people and 1,236 beds.
This marks the county’s highest incarceration rate since before the pandemic, even as crime in almost all categories is dropping. The surge — which is expected to increase — came at a time when the number of beds is the lowest since 1985.
San Francisco’s main San Bruno facility was greenlit in 2000, just after the height of the war on drugs, when the city held more than twice as many people in jail as it does today. For more than 20 years, jail capacity well exceeded the need.
Beginning in 2014, with historically low crime rates in the city and nationwide and the incarcerated population declining, the county mothballed parts of San Bruno and older facilities rather than keep the lights on in empty cells. Then London Breed, at the time president of the Board of Supervisors, led the body to reject $80 million from the state earmarked for a new jail.
Despite dropping crime rates, more people are ending up in San Francisco jails as decades of local criminal justice reforms are rolled back. That political backtrack is forcing the county to reopen old jail space many thought would never again be needed.
A new tough-on-crime stance that leads to strained facilities — it’s déjà vu all over again.
By the time the city’s incarceration rate peaked in 1993 and people in the outstripped lockups were sleeping on mattresses on the floor, law enforcement and the citizenry were rethinking tough-on-crime policies.
But infrastructure lags behind politics. The 440-bed Seventh Street jail that had been in the works since the mid-’80s opened in 1994. It marked the end of the federal oversight that had come from lawsuits fighting crowding in jails. The last time there were more people incarcerated in San Francisco’s jails than beds available for them was 2003.
The San Bruno jail opened in 2006, adding nearly 768 beds to the city’s capacity. It was a modern facility with open pods instead of closed cell blocks, room for education and activities, and a full-scale kitchen.
When District Attorney Brooke Jenkins took office in 2022, the city was grappling with a rise in crime after years of decline. Jenkins shifted away from diversion programs for drug arrests and toward lockups. As jail populations jumped and conditions worsened, there appeared to be little coordination or planning between the police making arrests and the Sheriff’s Department, which operates the county facilities, trying to keep up with them. The crowded jails grew more chaotic and violent.
The incarcerated population by 2024 had risen back to its prepandemic level, where it held steady for months.
Proposition 36 went into effect on Dec. 18, raising penalties for some theft and drug crimes and undoing previous reforms. The Sheriff’s Department had planned for this particular influx. “This recent surge is different, as we anticipated the possibility with the inception of Prop. 36,” a department spokesperson said in a statement.
But the surge coincides even more clearly with the day Lurie took office.
The mayor has asked police for more enforcement along corridors with the most visible quality-of-life issues, including Sixth Street south of Market and Mission Street near the 16th Street BART station. He has also asked SFPD Chief William Scott to double down on operations around Union Square, with officers moved out of district stations for downtown duty.
“I actually feel backed up by the city’s leaders,” one officer said of the Lurie administration.
Not all of those arrested end up incarcerated, but many more do now that the DA sends fewer to diversion programs and the sheriff has ended electronic monitoring.
The Sheriff’s Department plans to reopen a dormitory in San Bruno this month to make room for the new arrestees everyone agrees are likely on the way. So far, every reopened dorm has filled up almost immediately. If incarceration outpaces the sheriff’s efforts, a worse-case scenario could see San Francisco forced to rent beds in jails across the bay in Alameda County, which has one of the largest and historically most violent and troubled jails in California.
Even when political swings are predictable, infrastructure will never be able to keep pace.
“The pendulum can change quickly,” said Angela Chan, who works in the public defender’s office and is a former member of the San Francisco Police Commission. She added that a decline in incarceration remains the long-term trend, despite the recent rise. “You can’t have a big jail just in case things get conservative,” she noted.
The only comfort for the city might be that it has been here before — and it has all the old unused cell blocks to show for it.