Conditions at central California jail violate Constitution, DOJ finds

A Department of Justice report found several violations of conditions at a central California jail. 

The Justice Department said in a news release Tuesday that the San Luis Obispo County Jail (SLOC) violated the rights of its prisoners and subjected them to excessive amounts of force. 

The agency also said that the SLOC failed to provide prisoners with adequate mental and medical care, violated the constitutional rights of prisoners with serious mental illness and denied prisoners access to services, programs and activates due to their mental health disabilities. 

The SLOC was found to have violated the Eighth and 14th amendments of the Constitution, as well as the Americans with Disabilities Act, according to the news release. 

“Our Constitution guarantees that all people held in jails and prisons across our country are treated humanely, and that includes providing access to necessary medical and mental health care,”  Kristen Clarke, assistant attorney general in the Justice Department’s civil rights division, said in the news release. 

“After a comprehensive investigation, we found that San Luis Obispo Jail harms the people it incarcerates by subjecting them to excessive force and by failing to provide adequate medical and mental health care,” she continued. “The Justice Department hopes to continue to work with the jail to resolve these systemic problems.”

The Justice Department added that it provided the jail a written notice of the violations, required by the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, the news release noted.