It might not have been Moses descending from Mt. Sinai holding the 10 Commandments aloft, but by Santa Barbara standards, it was in some ways the next best thing. Last Thursday, Sheriff Bill Brown held a ceremonial ribbon cutting for the new North County Jail he promised to build when he first ran for office in 2006. Fifteen years later, 400 people showed up to celebrate an accomplishment that eluded two former sheriffs, Jim Thomas and Jim Anderson.
During his remarks, Brown spoke about how he had traveled around the country, inspecting other facilities to find what worked and what didn’t. “We wanted it to be bright, modern, and clean. We certainly didn’t want it to have the appearance of an assemblage of cages,” he said. “There’s not a single metal bar in this jail. We wanted it to be a place of inspiration and learning and hope.” To underscore this point, Brown noted, the Latin phrase Faber est quisque fortunae suae had been inscribed over the archway of the entrance: “Every person is the architect of their own destiny.”
Brown also borrowed a line from Nelson Mandela, who had famously remarked, “It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails.” By that measurement, Santa Barbara’s main jail just off Calle Real — built in 1971 — has long reflected poorly on the Santa Barbara community. It has been the subject of “cruel and inhuman” lawsuits almost from the day it opened. A hodgepodge of improvised wings and hallways, it was stitched together over time to deal with the chronic overcrowding. In less dire terms, Brown likes to describe the jail as the county’s version of the Winchester Mystery House.