PicoBlog

At 2:24 am, on October 1, 2023, a 21-year-old inmate at the Marin County Jail was found hanged in his cell. It was the second fatal hanging at the Marin County Jail in approximately 51 days. The Sonoma County Sheriff-Coroner performed the initial examination and described Dylan Baylacq as a "transient", but Baylacq had grown up in Marin, and was much loved in his community.

Marin County's jail holds, on average, only 245 inmates. By comparison, the largest jail in the New York City jail system is Rikers Island, which, according to the most recent New York City Comptroller's Office report, held 6,182 inmates in August and, so far, has had "only" nine inmate deaths in 2023. If Rikers Island matched the death rate of the Marin County Jail, Rikers would have at least 50 deaths this year instead of nine.

Within the Bay Area, we can compare the per-person 2023 death rate for the 245-person Marin County jail to the death rate of the infamous Santa Rita Jail in Alameda County, which, per the Department of Justice, holds nearly ten times the number of inmates. For a 2,400-inmate population, there have been, per KTVU, six inmate deaths at Santa Rita during 2023. If the per-inmate counts were equivalent, Santa Rita would have at least 20 deaths this year instead of six.

But there's another essential point of comparison to be made:

When an inmate dies at Rikers Island or Santa Rita, there is an immediate outcry by civil liberties groups, prison reform advocates, and local politicians, among others. (This past Thursday, I awoke to an interview on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show with New York City Council Member Carlina Rivera about that ninth death at Rikers Island, and she carefully and soberly outlined the work that the Council is doing to improve conditions at Rikers.)

But when an inmate dies in Marin County, there is silence, even from our elected officials. Marin County's weekly Pacific Sun newspaper didn't mention either of the two Marin County jail deaths (which may have something to do with revenues The Pacific Sun receives from the County itself.) Most people held at the Marin County Jail are destitute (or close enough), and thus, in the eyes of Marin's old guard and its nouveau riche (a group which includes a disturbing amount of tech and hedge fund money that also profits from the incarceration industry), inmates are disposable.

The Timing of The Most Recent Hanging Deaths at the Marin County Jail:

Sadly, the two recent deaths at the Marin County Jail were entirely predictable. They follow new, exploitative, disturbing practices at the County Jail, including the under-investigated Board of Supervisors-approved "involuntary psych medication" program; and "Pigeonly", a privatized mail system that requires family members to send letters to a company in Nevada, which then scans the letters, and mails the photocopies back to the jail for distribution. (Family members can pay additional monies for "rush" service, and complaints of double-billing and credit card overcharges are myriad.) None of these practices were even discussed by the County's hand-picked Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group (SCOWG), a gaggle of County insiders who could be trusted not to do anything.

After the August 10, 2023 hanging death at the County Jail, I went in person to the Board of Supervisors to point out that conditions in the jail contributed to inmate deaths. Not a single member of the SCOWG even bothered to show up, let alone ask about the deaths.

When the very people who are assigned to work on sheriff oversight say nothing when an inmate dies, there is no pressure on the Sheriff to make sure it does not happen again. And so it did happen again: Dylan Baylacq's body was found hanged only 51 days after Carlos Alejandro Chi-Chi was found hanged in a shared cell at the Marin County Jail.

How little thought members of the County’s Sheriff Civilian Oversight Working Group give to jail conditions as they preen before the public. For example, here is a link to a clip of SCOWG principal and HRC Vice Chair Curtis Aikens whitewashing conditions at the jail, and claiming the “isolation cell” is really just a “safety cell”:

https://x.com/marindatanow/status/1680813477080997889?s=46&t=q4VsCWEzorcI3TrikyJ90g

Do We Always Know When A Marin County Jail Inmate Dies?

It may surprise you to know that inmates who die at the jail in Marin County are not recorded in the Marin County Coroner logbook. Julianne Riebeling, held for over eight months in the Marin County Jail, was found hanged in her cell in February 2022, but her death is not recorded in the Marin County Sheriff-Coroner logbook. There is only a blank space for that entry.

To find Julianne Riebeling's entry, I would have to go to the Sonoma County Sheriff-Coroner, which handled the examination. It’s understandable that the Marin County Coroner would have a conflict of interest with regard to Marin County jail deaths, and that the Sonoma County Coroner should handle the examination. But there is no conflict of interest that should preclude Marin County Jail deaths from simply being included in the Marin Sheriff-Coroner logbook. There is also no reason for the Marin County Sheriff-Coroner not to include the annual Marin County Jail deaths in their Annual Report, but I was unable to find that information in the Annual Report, nor was I able to find that information in the Sheriff's Annual Report, which appears to be a glossy production that looks more like a marketing campaign than a proper report.

To learn that an inmate has died, we must first rely on the Marin Sheriff to disclose that information on its website, and that information may or may not be published in the local paper of record, The Marin Independent-Journal. The I-J has a close relationship with the Marin County Sheriff (to which it shows extremely favorable bias), and it has a publicly announced official partnership with the County of Marin for "drug awareness messaging.”

Thus, when the Marin I-J does report the jail deaths, it does so in way that shields the County's jail and prosecutors by including the charges against the dead inmate (often exaggerated by police and prosecutors), even though the dead inmate is no longer even alive to await trial for crimes they may or may not have committed. It also appears that the I-J is excluding from its reporting the sequence and timing (for example, how long between one death at the County Jail and the preceding death at the County Jail.) Or any comparable statistics about the jail deaths, for example, any sentence that reads: "Person (A) was the (first, second, third?) inmate to die this year while in custody at the Marin County Jail", or, "There have been (1,2,3...) deaths in the Marin County Jail this year as of this writing, and the average number of deaths at the jail is (insert average) which on a per-inmate basis compares favorably/ unfavorably with (San Francisco/Contra Costa/Alameda)."

Marin's Wealthy Liberal-Conservatives Dismiss County Jail Deaths:

Local media either ignores the County's jail deaths entirely (The Pacific Sun), or smears the dead (The Marin Independent-Journal). After Alejandro Chi-Chi, a produce manager at Safeway, was found hanged in his cell in August, the case was supposed to be investigated by the San Rafael Police Department. During this time, San Rafael Police Officer Lynn Murphy started what appeared to be a whisper campaign to play down the jail's responsibility for the care of its inmates, telling those who asked that Chi-Chi had been accused of molestation, and thus his hanging death was "understandable."

Even if you believed that the charges in the Chi-Chi case warranted a hanging death, which the sentencing guidelines do not suggest, there is still the issue of both the accused and the alleged victim having a right to a fair and speedy court trial. That cannot happen when the Sheriff allows the accused to be hanged (whether by their own hand or not) in the County's costly underground jail. But such is the mentality in the County: The hanging death of an inmate is “understandable”.

I was heartened to see the outpouring of affection for Dylan Baylacq from the community in West Marin, but it was unnerving that no one seemed capable of acknowledging where or how he had suddenly passed. To acknowledge that the death occurred in the County Jail is to acknowledge that our carceral system is broken. And in that sense, it at least allows us to acknowledge that we have a common cause, as well as a common responsibility, to demand real changes to the current system.

To acknowledge that the death occurred in the County Jail is also to acknowledge that one has common cause with other communities in Marin that have suffered far more from incarceration, for example, the Black community in Marin City, and the Latino community in the Canal and West Marin.

The Sheriff Is Sending You A Message:

The Board of Supervisors sent a message to the Sheriff by assembling a “sheriff civilian oversight working group” made up of insiders with extreme conflicts of interest, and then handing the Sheriff a large wad of additional cash.

And Sheriff Scardina is sending a message back. During the June 23, 2023 Board of Supervisors meeting when the oversight proposals were accepted, Sheriff Scardina was effusive in praising the working group for its willingness to "work with him." A week later, on June 30, Sheriff Scardina got even more: the Board of Supervisors handed him an additional $2.86 million with no strings attached.

With these two inmate hanging deaths just a few months later, Sheriff Scardina's message could not be more clear. Given more money, more military equipment, involuntary psych meds for inmates, and with the most toothless civilian oversight, he has everything he wants and is accountable to no one.

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