These are tough times at the San Joaquin County Jail.

But despite a number of escapes from the honor farm facility and a number of inmate deaths attributed to drug overdoses, San Joaquin County Sheriff Pat Withrow said in his monthly address to the public that his officers are doing everything that they can to ensure that both the public and those incarcerated remain safe during these uncertain times.

According to Withrow, part of the problem is that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation are not taking inmates that are scheduled to be transferred to state prison because of the COVID-19 pandemic – forcing the county to house inmates in quarters that were never intended for these types of inmates.

“We’ve been having some escapes over at the honor farm because CDCR is making us keep all of these state inmates here – we don’t have room for our regular, local inmates so we’re having to bring everybody who gets booked in because of COVID over to the honor farm to stay at G and H barracks and that’s not built for security,” Withrow said in his monthly video address. “We’ve been beefing all of that up to try and secure it and every time they find a new place to sneak out and we secure that with more barbed wire and wires and bars – we’re getting to the point that it’s very secure.

“But I’m so proud of our staff – every time we’ve had somebody escape, we’ve either caught them in the process of doing it, caught them on the roadway just as they got outside of the fence line, or we get our patrol units and we go out and pick them up in public and we’ve had them all back in within 24 hours.”

In keeping with his campaign promise of transparency, Withrow also talked about the abundance of illegal narcotics that are finding their way into the facility and the work that his deputies are doing to try and find the substances before disaster strikes.

Unfortunately, that hasn’t always been successful.

Despite a number of inmate deaths related to drug use, Withrow said that he’s proud of his officers for the work that they are doing – catching people attempting to smuggle drugs into the facility has been commonplace – and said that the work will continue.

“The officers have been doing a great job with our dope dogs and finding stashes before they get in there and we’ve doing searches in custody and finding all that we can. But it sneaks in sometimes hidden in the mail or absorbed into paper or whatever or however they’re getting it in,” Withrow said. “That’s unfortunately causing us to have some inmates get very, very sick and die and then we have to use Narcan to bring them back and unfortunately we’ve had a couple of deaths in custody.

“We’re working very hard to curb that and our officers are working day and night doing searches and everything that they can to keep that out of our custody and we’re going to continue to work hard to keep our inmates safe – we want them to stay safe – and keep that out of our facility.”

To contact reporter Jason Campbell email jcampbell@mantecabulletin.com or call 209.249.3544.