8 MOTHER JONES |^ JULY / AUGUST 2019
OUTFRONTthe last bus of the day pulls away from
the parking lot outside the Santa Rita Jail
in Dublin, California, at 8:43 p.m. Twenty
minutes later, a young woman pulls up
the hood of her dark jacket, pushes open
the jail lobby’s heavy door, and steps out
into the night, looking for a cigarette.
Leah, as I’ll call her, is not the only
just-released inmate trying to score a
smoke. “Who’s got a fucking cigarette?”
yells a man bursting through the door
behind her. Near the bus stop, Leah finds
a butt burned almost all the way to the
filter. Clutching it, she approaches me
for a lighter. I don’t have one; I offer her
my cellphone instead.
Leah, whose voice is
shaking, wants to call
her mom. She’s plan-
ning to take the train
home. It’s a 35-minute
trek, in the dark, to
the station.
When her call goes
to voicemail, Leah be-
comes distraught. “I
don’t want to walk this
path, but I will,” she
says into the phone.
“I love you, and I’ll
see you soon, if I get
there.” More than a
week later, when I text
her mother, she tells
me Leah never made
it home. Leah is an addict, she explains.
It’s not unusual for jails large and small
to release inmates after dark or in the
early hours of the morning. For many
people released before daybreak, the
hours that follow are difficult, danger-
ous, and sometimes deadly. Many hit
the streets without phones, money, a
ride, or knowledge of local public trans-
portation, if it’s still running. They may
be struggling with addiction or mental
health issues; some have no place to go.
In Los Angeles, men and women let out
at night often find their way to nearby
Skid Row. Chicago’s Cook County Jail
releases people into a dangerous neigh-
borhood after dark. (Discharged inmates
often head to a local Popeyes for sanctu-
ary.) “It’s hard to think of a more coun-
terproductive, self-defeating measure if
we want people to succeed when they
get out of jail than releasing them in themiddle of the night,” says David Fathi,
director of the American Civil Liberties
Union’s prison project.
Eight months before I encountered
Leah, Jessica St. Louis was released from
Santa Rita at 1:25 a.m. on a Saturday. The
26-year-old had been picked up on minor
charges before, and almost every time
she was set free, “she ends up at our
place,” says Benita Turner, her foster
mother. Turner lives 20 minutes from
the jail, but on the morning of July 28,
2018, neither St. Louis nor the jail called
her. St. Louis set off alone with nothing
but a transit ticket issued by the jail. The
trains wouldn’t start running for several
hours. She was found outside the station
before daybreak, dead from an overdose
of heroin laced with fentanyl, according
to the county coroner’s office.
Turner still has questions about
how her foster daughter died—where
she found drugs in the early morning
or got the money to pay for them. “We
will never know the answer to that,”
says Sergeant Ray Kelly, the spokes-
person for the Alameda County Sheriff ’s
Office, which runs Santa Rita Jail. Stud-
ies show that inmates’ risk of dying is
highest in the two weeks following re-
lease from jail or prison; overdoses are
the most frequent cause of death. “We’ve
had people leave jail and then get home
and go back on drugs and overdose and
die, I’m sure,” Kelly says. (The jail does
hand out naloxone, a drug that reverses
opioid overdoses, but only to inmates
with a prescription.) If Santa Rita had
discharged St. Louis at 7 a.m., would it
have changed anything? “I don’t know
that the hour of the night would have
made a difference,” Kelly says.
Santa Rita usually lets out 50 to 100
inmates between 4:30 p.m. and 4:30 a.m.
every day. Some have just posted bail. A
few have been arrested late in the day
for a misdemeanor like public drunk-
enness and let go with a citation. Those
who have received a release order from a
judge earlier in the day may wait in hold-
ing cells for hours while jail employees
confirm their release and handle their
paperwork. The process freezes three
times a day during head count. Ditto if
there’s a fight or other emergency.
Theoretically, approving a release
could take 30 minutes, says a Santa Ritalieutenant who oversees the records de-
partment. In practice, it can take four
to six hours—or eight, if the paperwork
comes up late. According to Kelly, that’s
likely why it was after 1 a.m. when Santa
Rita staff unlocked the release door for
St. Louis. Late-night releases at Santa
Rita have become so common that local
lawyers and judges have devised a work-
around to protect vulnerable defendants,
such as those who have disabilities or who
are homeless. On a recent morning in an
Oakland, California, courtroom, Judge
Victoria Kolakowski eyes a skinny, wild-
haired man who has admitted to breaking
his parents’ restraining order against him.
As the man paces at the front of her court-“Anybody
getting
released in
the middle of
the night—
her safety is
threatened.”Santa Rita Jail at night