Butte County officials have high hopes for a new jail that opened in Oroville last week.
“This is the facility that I think is going to allow us to address the needs of the inmate population that we have now and will have into the future,” Butte County Sheriff Kory Honea told NSPR at a ribbon-cutting ceremony last Friday.
The 37,000-square-foot building sits next to the old jail and has a new intake center, updated housing, and a medical and mental health care wing. The facility adds more than 130 beds to the old jail, which has been facing capacity issues since at least 2011, when then-California Gov. Jerry Brown signed Assembly Bill 109 to reduce overcrowding in the state’s 33 prisons.
“The facilities that we were operating were built at a time that didn't contemplate you'd be housing people for that long — they just weren't set up for that.”- Kory Honea, Butte County Sheriff
Under AB 109, individuals who committed low-level crimes and used to be sent to state prisons would now go to their county jails. Suddenly, local counties like Butte were responsible for housing and rehabilitating a much larger population of people in jail for longer sentences.
“The facilities that we were operating were built at a time that didn't contemplate you'd be housing people for that long — they just weren't set up for that,” Honea said.
With the new jail’s medical and mental health wing, Honea said the county will be in a much better position to house people with long-term sentences.
“And while we're there, provide programming to address the underlying cause of their criminal behavior and address any medical or mental health issues that they have,” he said.
The jail expansion project took over a decade to come to fruition. Honea said the long timeline had to do with both budget challenges and various local disasters that rocked the county in recent years.
“We went through all of the things that Butte County has experienced,” Honea said. “From the Oroville spillway incident to the Camp Fire to the North Complex Fire and every other fire and calamity in between …”
The project cost came out to $44 million. Most of the funding was paid for by the state through California Senate Bill 863, which requires counties to contribute at least 10% of project costs.
Honea says the plan is to open the jail in phases as the sheriff’s office works out staffing.
