SF DA Gascón to use $2M MacArthur grant in bid to thin out jails

San Francisco District Attorney George Gasc—n answers questions during a press conference detailing a new policy which vacates 3000 marijuana-related misdemeanor convictions and 8,000 marijuana-related felony convictions in San Francisco on January 31, 2018. less San Francisco District Attorney George Gasc—n answers questions during a press conference detailing a new policy which vacates 3000 marijuana-related misdemeanor convictions and 8,000 marijuana-related felony ... more Photo: Josh Edelson / The Chronicle 2018 Photo: Josh Edelson / The Chronicle 2018 Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close SF DA Gascón to use $2M MacArthur grant in bid to thin out jails 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

The San Francisco district attorney’s office received a $2 million grant from the MacArthur Foundation that it will use in a bid to reduce the city’s inmate population and wipe out a looming need for a new city jail over the next two years, officials said Tuesday.

District Attorney George Gascón outlined a plan in which his office will collaborate with experts and other criminal justice agencies to expedite cases, analyze outcomes and reduce recidivism. A focus of the reforms, Gascón said, will be inmates whose repeated troubles trace to mental illness and addiction. The goal is to reduce the jail population — which generally hovers around 1,250 — by 16 percent in two years.

“What we’re doing today hasn’t worked for a long time,” Gascón said. “So this is really a down payment on the creation of a blueprint to take us into the 21st century.”

The effort comes as lawmakers work to reduce the city’s jail population after the Board of Supervisors in 2015 voted not to allocate $215 million for a project to begin replacing the run-down jail at the Hall of Justice. County Jail No. 4 is seismically unsafe and has no room for many programs provided to inmates at other city facilities.

Instead of building a new jail, city leaders in 2016 created a 39-member working group tasked with identifying and funding programs designed to reduce what are known as occupied bed days. According to estimates, San Francisco must reduce bed days by 83,220 a year to close County Jail No. 4.

The group has a hearing at the Board of Supervisors Public Safety and Neighborhood Services Committee on Wednesday.

Even as the city has funded new departments to chip away at the jail population, and as recent bail-reform efforts prompt more inmates to be released before trial, the jails have not significantly thinned. That’s because most of the recent programs target lower-level offenders, and inmates who spend 15 days or less in jail occupy only about 3 percent of all bed days, said a report this year by the city Controller’s Office. Inmates who spend 180 days or more in jail take up about 78 percent of bed days, the report found.

Gascón, who has opposed building a new jail, hopes the approach funded by the MacArthur Foundation grant can reduce the jail population enough to close County Jail No. 4.

“We have done a lot of things, but we’re still basically in the same place that we were three years ago,” he said.

The grant will fund services for inmates, a policy analyst for San Francisco Superior Court, and another analyst to study who is in custody. The district attorney’s office will bring in experts to collect data and identify ways to reduce the jail population.

“We still have a recurring problem and it’s our high recidivism rate,” Gascón said. “We have the same people coming in and out. That’s a system failure.”

Around 40 percent of the jail population receives psychiatric treatment and 15 percent suffer from a serious mental illness, according to the city legislative analyst’s office. Even so, people in custody wait 120 days on average for a bed in a community-based residential treatment program — more than five times the wait in the community, said Tara Anderson, director of policy at the district attorney’s office.

“If we can expedite people to treatment and expedite their case through the system, we shorten lengths of stay and simultaneously reduce the number of times someone is coming into custody,” she said.

Case continuances, in which attorneys for defendants charged with serious crimes delay going to trial, have long been a source of frustration for San Francisco prosecutors. Rather than resolving their cases and being sent to state prison, many inmates delay trials and do much of their time locally, clogging up jails in San Francisco, Gascón said. He hopes a court analyst can help quantify the issue and bring those findings to judges.

The grant is part of the MacArthur Foundation’s Safety and Justice Challenge, which has awarded $148 million to cities and counties with the goal of reforming jails and reducing over-incarceration. Three years after its inception, many cities in the network are seeing positive results. Philadelphia has decreased its jail population by 36 percent, according to the MacArthur Foundation.

Evan Sernoffsky is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: esernoffsky@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @evansernoffsky