- This event has passed.
Demonstration at St. Rita Jail: Care Not Deaths
April 1, 2023 @ 1:00 pm - 3:00 pm
We are demonstrating for Care Not Deaths to stop the deaths at Santa Rita Jail – including four more lives lost in January and February this year.
Please join us in a protest to stand with the Care First, Jails Last Community Coalition on April 1, at Santa Rita Jail in Dublin (5325 Broder Blvd), starting at 1:00 pm.
Please complete the form (linked here and below) to get specific information about exactly where to meet, and what we’ll be doing. We will send those details to everyone who responds to the poll.
Since the Board of Supervisors’ passage of the Care First, Jails Last Resolution in 2021, we’ve been building power to end the county’s reliance on the criminal legal system to meet the needs of residents with mental health and substance use needs. Collectively, we do this by advocating for divestment from Alameda County’s criminal legal apparatus and reinvestment of this money into an upstream, community-based, life-affirming continuum of care. We don’t want to see individuals’ crises addressed inside the county jail.
Yet in just the first two months of 2023, under the care of the newly elected Sheriff, four people incarcerated at Santa Rita Jail lost their lives: Stephen Lofton on January 17; Elizabeth Laurel on February 13; Charles Johnson on February 4; and Candice “Cody” Van Buren on February 28. Cody Van Buren’s death is at least the 66th in Santa Rita Jail since 2014, according to KTVU. Seven other people at Santa Rita experienced fentanyl overdoses in February.
At this moment, Alameda County is going from bad to worse, and we are raising our voices next Saturday, April 1st. While 48% of the county’s discretionary budget is allocated to the Sheriff’s office in the name of “public safety,” our communities are becoming increasingly more unsafe due to the widening of criminalization nets, a lack of deeply affordable housing, and an underfunding of upstream, community-based, and voluntary mental and behavioral health services. The most vulnerable among us are Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples, our unhoused neighbors, and those experiencing serious mental illness. There is no justifiable reason for the continued overfunding of the county’s carceral institutions when these resources are being used to deepen racial disparities and destabilize our care systems. It is abundantly clear: jails do not make us safer. Our loved ones and neighbors should not be pushed through the criminal legal system for lack of mental health services in the community.
Link to form: https://formsgle/HecLF1XCRSa4Gpw57
Please join us on Saturday, April 1 at Santa Rita Jail to call out these injustices and for Care First. For more information, you can email John Lindsay-Poland at JLindsay-Poland@afsc.org