Santa Clara County's Board of Supervisors voted unanimously yesterday to approve a framework for a jail revamp plan that could cost between $1 billion and $2.5 billion, kicking off what officials describe as the first phase of a 15-year overhaul of facilities supervisors themselves have called deplorable. The plan will tear down some of the county's worst-condition buildings and construct new medical, mental health, and male housing units at the Elmwood Correctional Facility in Milpitas, even as it results in a net loss of more than 1,000 jail beds.
The vote came after county residents packed the meeting to call for no new jails at all, according to The Mercury News. More than 50 residents spoke in opposition to building new jail facilities, and the newspaper reported that the county faced criticism over the potential billion-dollar investment alongside the demands for alternatives. Carla Torres told supervisors she was shocked and disappointed that the county would consider adding or upgrading a facility at all, while Brandon Sanchez called for investment in intervention while people are still young.
Supervisor Sylvia Arenas said she does not want a new jail, explaining that incarcerated people would resemble her, according to the same report. Supervisor Margaret Abe-Koga countered that the jail conditions are deplorable and that the county cannot wait to act, while Supervisor Susan Ellenberg said the county must simultaneously work to prevent entry into the criminal legal system while still caring for people who are incarcerated now.
Federal Court Orders Are Driving the Overhaul
The pressure to rebuild traces back more than a decade. An inmates' rights group sued Santa Clara County in 2015 over inmate treatment, poor medical care, and excessive solitary confinement after guards beat and killed mentally ill inmate Michael Tyree that year, and a separate group of inmates sued the county in 2016 over accessibility issues. Federal judges imposed legally binding jail-improvement plans in early 2019, and the county has since paid millions of dollars in settlements over jail incidents and injuries while instituting officer retraining and body-camera reforms, per the Mercury News.
Those two lawsuits became the Chavez and Cole consent decrees, which together carry 463 mandatory remedial items covering everything from inmate medical and mental healthcare to solitary confinement and ADA physical accessibility, according to the County of Santa Clara Office of the County Counsel. County administrators argue that the existing structures at San Jose's Main Jail and Milpitas' Elmwood complex simply cannot accommodate the mandated medical and mental health services, which is why officials say physical reconstruction, not just staffing changes, is required.
A Decade of Stalled Plans and Rising Costs
This is not the county's first attempt to solve the problem. Supervisors razed Main Jail South in 2020 with plans to build a replacement, then paused the effort to study non-carceral alternatives before approving a 500-bed maximum security plan in 2022, according to San José Spotlight. That plan was later abandoned as projected costs jumped from $390 million to $747 million by mid-2025, leaving the county without a completed replacement facility for six years.
The newly approved framework tries to thread that needle by shrinking overall capacity rather than expanding it. The Santa Clara County Sheriff's Office reports an average daily jail population of 2,751 inmates and roughly 30,000 annual bookings, down from pre-pandemic figures that routinely topped 3,200, which officials cite as the reason the plan can shed more than 1,000 beds while still meeting current custody needs. Supervisors have said the county could hold off on later phases of the plan if incarceration continues to decrease and court mandates are otherwise met, and no funding sources, contracts, or final facility designs have been decided yet — the board has urged the county to engage the community and incarcerated people themselves in the design process going forward.
Opposition Groups Say the Money Belongs Elsewhere
Not everyone at the meeting was focused on federal mandates. Deb St. Julian argued that investing in care could decrease both crime and incarceration rates over time, echoing a broader argument from civil rights organization Silicon Valley De-Bug, which formally submitted public comments urging supervisors to reject the plan altogether. The group contends that committing capital funds to jail construction during a severe county budget deficit diverts resources away from housing, education, and community mental health diversion — arguments laid out in its public comment to the board.
The county's Recommended Budget for the current fiscal year totals $14.7 billion and was designed to preserve safety-net services, public safety, and behavioral health programs despite significant cuts in federal funding, according to figures reported through county announcements. Supervisors acknowledged the county may need to take on debt to renovate the facilities, a prospect that fueled much of the resident pushback at Tuesday's meeting.
Reforms Already Underway, but Slowly
The jail system's troubled history extends well beyond the pending construction. A decade after the 2016 Blue Ribbon Commission on custody operations issued 623 recommendations in the wake of Tyree's death, an audit found the county had fully implemented only 51 percent of them — 316 recommendations — as of mid-2024, as Hoodline previously reported. That slow pace has coincided with continuing incidents inside the jails, including the May sentencing of a former sheriff's deputy to 45 days in custody for unlocking a cell and directing inmate trustees to attack another detainee at Elmwood's Module 4C.
The Sheriff's Office logged 603 total use-of-force incidents in 2025, down slightly from 621 the year before, with jail-based incidents involving 769 individuals across Main Jail and Elmwood and chemical agent deployments falling to 181. County officials point to more recent efforts as evidence that reform is possible without new construction, including a renovated men's library opened at Elmwood in May in partnership with Mission College, and a Section 1115 Medicaid waiver program launched in early 2026 that enrolls eligible detainees into Medi-Cal up to 90 days before release with mental health support and a 30-day prescription supply upon discharge.
Supervisors framed the newly approved improvements as complementary to those efforts rather than a replacement for them. Improved facilities could expand access to medical and mental healthcare while also creating space for programs meant to decrease recidivism and support re-entry, though the timeline for that transformation stretches to 2034 — nearly a decade from now, and eight years longer than the county's last aborted attempt at fixing the same problem.
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