On December 2, 2022, Plaintiffs’ counsel in Hedrick v. Grant, Eastern District of California No. 2:76 CV 00162, released a Monitoring Report on conditions at the Yuba County Jail. This Report concludes that the Hedrick Defendants still are not in compliance with multiple provisions of the Amended Consent Decree approved by Federal Magistrate Judge Edmund F. Brennan in early 2019. To produce the Report, Plaintiffs’ counsel reviewed documents covering the second and third quarters of 2022, interviewed numerous class members, and conducted a monitoring tour of the Jail on November 8, 2022. The Report specifically notes, among other things, inadequate medical and mental health staffing at the Jail; overuse of administrative segregation and other restrictive housing, including as long-term housing for class members with severe mental illness; inadequate reviews of the need for restrictive housing placements in specific cases; inadequate and untimely medical and mental-health assessments and treatment for class members housed in safety and step-down cells; and inadequate sick-call triage practices. A redacted version of the latest monitoring report is available here.
Plaintiffs’ counsel also released an amended version of an earlier monitoring report, dated June 8, 2022, on the Jail’s compliance with the Amended Consent Decree during the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022. The June 8 Amended Report found, among other things, severely inadequate medical and mental health staffing; a severe breakdown in the Jail’s medical and mental health systems that led to a class member suicide; unreasonable delays in the completion of certain physical modifications required by the ACD to mitigate the risk of suicide in the Jail; and ongoing refusals to provide documentation relating to compliance with the ACD’s sick-call requirements. A redacted version of the June 8 Amended Report can is available here. All of the monitoring reports in Hedrick are linked below.