Behind the Walls: The Women, the Jail, the Oversight Failure, and the Politics of Selective Outrage in San Francisco
Top Left: Julie D. Soo, Board member Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board
Top Right: Sheriff Paul Miyamoto
Middle Row (left to right): Alan Wong, Stephen Sherrill, and Rafael Mandelman
San Francisco County Board of Supervisors
Bottom Left: San Francisco County Jail #2
https://www.streetsheet.org/san-francisco-sheriff-seeks-82-mill-county-jail-renovation/
Bottom Right: William Palmer
https://www.facebook.com/SFChronicle/posts/the-move-follows-a-chronicle-investigation-into-william-palmer-president-of-the-/1657155006455903/
Disclosure: I have had prior professional contact with William Palmer through his former radio program, Cafe Revolution on KPOO 89.5 FM, and I attended Sheriff’s Department oversight hearings referenced in this article. I also spent time incarcerated inside San Francisco County Jail facilities, including San Bruno. That history informs this reporting but does not alter the documented public record on which this investigation is based.
Part I asked where the people went.
Part II begins where many of them landed: inside a county jail system the City’s own Civil Grand Jury says was already overcrowded, understaffed, technologically obsolete, and nearing a “breaking point.” It begins, more specifically, with the women who say that once they were locked inside San Francisco County Jail No. 2, they were denied sunlight, subjected to degrading treatment, trapped in unhealthy conditions, and forced to live under the control of a system that too often spoke the language of care while functioning through neglect.
The women’s lawsuits should have shattered any remaining illusion that San Francisco’s jail crisis is mainly a matter of budget spreadsheets, staffing charts, or old buildings. Those things matter. But the crisis becomes undeniable at the point where it enters the body: in the form of sleeplessness, humiliation, fear, digestive illness, artificial light, inadequate hot water, lockdowns, retaliation, and the knowledge that the people who control your daily existence may also be the ones violating your dignity.
That is the hidden ledger of San Francisco’s homelessness and enforcement policy. What disappeared from the sidewalk did not disappear from the city. It moved into institutions. And once inside those institutions, especially the jails, people encountered conditions that now raise serious questions not only about management, but about civil rights, human dignity, and the moral credibility of the political leaders who allowed those conditions to persist.
THE WOMEN AT COUNTY JAIL NO. 2
The women held at County Jail No. 2 did not describe isolated inconveniences. They described a pattern.
In June 2026, nine women filed a class-action lawsuit alleging unhealthy and unequal conditions inside the jail. According to reporting on the complaint, they alleged chronic plumbing malfunctions, inadequate hot water, limited exercise space, lack of direct sunlight, constant exposure to artificial light, and food conditions serious enough to contribute to weight gain, sleep disruption, and digestive problems. The women argued that they were subjected to conditions worse than those faced by men in county custody and that those conditions violated both federal and state constitutional protections.
Those allegations did not emerge in a vacuum. They arrived after months of mounting scrutiny over the women’s unit and after separate allegations that at least 19 to 20 women had been subjected to humiliating strip searches in May 2025. According to reporting by KQED and the San Francisco Public Press, women alleged they were ordered one by one to strip, bend over, and expose their bodies while male deputies observed, laughed, joked, and in some cases kept body-worn cameras activated. Some women said they were told the footage might be used for “training purposes.” Their attorneys alleged that the searches violated Sheriff’s policy, invaded privacy, and amounted to degrading treatment of incarcerated women in a trauma-saturated environment.
The Sheriff’s Office denied key aspects of the women’s allegations, insisting that women were searched individually by female deputies in private stalls. But even as the department disputed the core accounts, the public record shows that complaints were filed, litigation followed, and administrative responses occurred. According to the Public Press, two supervisors assigned to County Jail No. 2 were later reassigned while investigations continued. The point is not that nothing happened. The point is that women had to endure the treatment, file grievances, organize, pursue claims, draw press attention, and ultimately sue to force the system to respond at all.
That is not what accountability looks like.
That is what desperation looks like.
The women’s claims matter not only because of what they say happened, but because of where they occurred: inside a jail system where the City already knew conditions were under stress, where staffing shortages were chronic, where the detained population had become more mentally ill and medically fragile, and where the infrastructure itself had become unreliable. By the time these women came forward, San Francisco had already been warned that the institution was failing.
WHAT THE CITY ALREADY KNEW
When the Civil Grand Jury released its June 2026 report, it did not describe a system surprised by crisis. It described a system in prolonged, visible decline.
The report found that San Francisco’s jails had reached an average daily population of roughly 1,281 people by early April 2026. About 85 percent were pretrial detainees. Forty-seven percent had active mental-health cases. Thirty-seven percent were taking psychiatric medication. Sworn custody staffing had remained 20 to 30 percent below authorized levels for years. Deputies averaged 28 overtime hours a week. Overtime costs had nearly doubled since FY19, and the department had become increasingly dependent on exhaustion to keep basic operations functioning.
The Grand Jury also documented physical deterioration: failing plumbing, broken kitchen systems, defective laundry equipment, outdated booking technology, and deferred capital improvements. Mission Local, synthesizing those findings, reported crowding so severe that excess people were being held in gym space and an intake process strained by its de facto role as a detox facility. These were not hidden defects. They were observable institutional conditions in a system still expected to absorb the consequences of rising arrests, intensified drug-market enforcement, and increased anti-homeless policing.
This matters because the treatment of the women in County Jail No. 2 cannot be understood as a discrete scandal floating free of institutional context. The alleged abuse, the degrading searches, the unhealthy daily conditions, and the chronic deprivation all emerged within a jail system already operating under visible structural distress. The women were not only accusing individual deputies or supervisors. Their lawsuits and complaints exposed what happens when an overstressed institution is left to govern vulnerable human beings through routine control rather than humane care.
What the record shows is not surprise, but notice. For years, San Francisco had already been told that its jail system was overcrowded, under-staffed, antiquated, poorly ventilated, and burdened by unresolved accountability failures. The 2005–06 Civil Grand Jury called these “longstanding problems,” and even that report pointed back to a 1999–2000 grand jury warning about ventilation and airflow failures in Jails #1 and #2. By 2003–04, grand jurors were raising Sheriff’s Department grievance issues serious enough to trigger a Board of Supervisors hearing. That history strips City Hall of any claim that the abuses now coming into view were unforeseeable. The women who later described degrading strip-searches, lack of sunlight, broken plumbing, and retaliatory treatment were not exposing an abrupt breakdown, but the predictable human cost of a system the city had been warned about again and again. And the William Palmer controversy would only sharpen that contradiction: San Francisco could mobilize scrutiny when scandal attached to a single personality, but not when the scandal was structural, longstanding, and unfolding every day behind jail walls.
WHAT I KNOW ABOUT SAN BRUNO
I know this system from public records.
I also know part of it from the inside.
I spent time incarcerated at San Bruno Jail. That does not make my account more important than the women’s. It does not outrank their lawsuits, their grievances, or their testimony. But it does matter for one reason: it allows me to say plainly that San Francisco’s jail system cannot be reduced to a one-dimensional story, and that complexity makes the larger failure harder — not easier — to excuse.
Inside San Bruno, I saw genuine efforts by some people to do meaningful work. I experienced the C.O.V.E.R. veterans’ program. I saw how peer support, public-health care, and structured programming could offer men a route toward dignity and healing. I have written before that San Francisco’s Department of Public Health, unlike some for-profit carceral health systems elsewhere, demonstrated that real care inside confinement is possible. That truth matters because fairness matters. If we are going to indict a system, we should indict it honestly.
But honesty cuts both ways.
The existence of sincere clinicians, treatment efforts, and rehabilitation programming does not erase the larger institutional failure. It makes that failure more disturbing. Because what I also saw — and what detained people repeatedly reported — was how fragile every meaningful program became once the jail was overwhelmed. Lockdowns swallowed movement. Staffing shortages blocked programming. Social workers and rehabilitative services could be cut off by operational stress. A jail can advertise treatment and still function through control. It can hold out the language of healing while remaining structurally organized around custody, scarcity, and interruption.
That is why the women’s accounts should not be read as unbelievable because some good people work inside the system. The opposite is true. Anyone who has lived inside carceral institutions understands that a jail can contain decent staff, meaningful programs, and real medical effort while still producing routine degradation, humiliation, and violence. A jail can contain individual care without becoming a humane institution. The women’s lawsuits force the city to confront that distinction.
WILLIAM PALMER AND THE POLITICS OF SELECTIVE OUTRAGE
No honest account of sheriff oversight in San Francisco can avoid William Palmer. I knew Palmer through his former radio program, Cafe Revolution on KPOO 89.5 FM, long before his name became attached to public scandal. I also sat through oversight discussions where his presence could dominate the room — not always because of the substance of jail conditions, but because he had become, for many people, a symbol onto whom the city’s anxieties about oversight, criminal justice, and credibility could be projected.
Palmer’s legal and political controversies are part of the record. Mission Local reported in April 2024 that the criminal case against him was dismissed after prosecutors said they could not proceed because of evidence issues affecting the complaining witness’s credibility. His defender argued the dismissal vindicated him, while the District Attorney said it intended to refile. Palmer also faced pressure to resign from his public roles. Whatever one’s view of Palmer personally, his controversies quickly became headline material and political fuel.
That is where the contradiction becomes impossible to ignore.
San Francisco’s political class proved it could summon outrage, scrutiny, and public pressure when the controversy had a face, a name, and a headline-ready story. But the same city showed far less sustained force when the controversy was systemic: millions in inappropriate overtime, a collapsing oversight structure, women alleging degrading searches and retaliation, a jail population with soaring mental-health needs, and a Civil Grand Jury warning that the entire system was in crisis.
That is not accountability.
That is selective accountability.
It is easier to go after a man than a machine.
It is easier to moralize about Palmer than to explain why women had to sue over conditions that should have triggered immediate, independent, and aggressive scrutiny long before litigation became necessary.
It is easier to denounce one damaged or controversial figure than to confront a Sheriff’s Department spending tens of millions above budget on overtime while the institutions supposedly overseeing it remain underfunded, unstable, and at times barely functional.
Whatever one thinks of William Palmer, the moral center of this story is not William Palmer.
It is the women.
It is the detained.
It is the people whose lives were placed inside a system the City already knew was failing.
OVERSIGHT IN NAME, NOT IN FORCE
If San Francisco’s Sheriff oversight system appears weak, the city’s own records explain why.
The Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board’s 2025 first-quarter report states that Inspector General Terry Wiley resigned effective January 10, 2025, citing insufficient funding and poor budget projections. The same report says the board conducted no community outreach in Q1, had received no Sheriff’s Inspector General report before issuing its own, and had canceled its January meeting for lack of quorum. This was not robust independent oversight. It was a structure visibly struggling to stand.
KQED later reported that the Oversight Board itself faced possible elimination by the Commission Streamlining Task Force and that it had been flagged as a “borderline inactive” body with a vacancy rate exceeding 25 percent. Former board member Jayson Wechter had already resigned, citing what KQED described as the agency’s “general dysfunction.” Supervisor Shamann Walton opposed folding sheriff oversight into the Department of Police Accountability, warning that DPA already lacked the capacity to absorb that additional burden.
Now place that record next to the women’s complaints.
According to KQED, the women’s strip-search allegations triggered complaints to both the Sheriff’s Office and the Department of Police Accountability. The Sheriff’s Office said “personnel action” had been taken but denied the women’s account of a mass strip search. KQED also reported that Walton said underfunded oversight left people in custody, especially women, vulnerable, while Supervisor Jackie Fielder said the episode reflected what happens when the current sheriff oversight structure is not funded.
This is the deeper scandal.
The city did not simply fail to stop abuse. It built an oversight system too weak, too unstable, too underfunded, or too politically disposable to inspire confidence that abuse would be meaningfully investigated when it occurred.
The women were expected to trust a process the city itself had neglected.
MILLIONS FOR OVERTIME, PENNIES FOR ACCOUNTABILITY
If anyone still doubts where the city’s priorities have been, the overtime record resolves the question.
In March 2026, Mission Local reported that the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department was projected to spend $60.2 million on overtime in FY 2025–26 — 46 percent above the $41.2 million approved by the Board of Supervisors, a projected overrun of $19 million. The department warned that attempts to contain the problem would affect response times, reduce access to incarcerated people, and decrease services. The Civil Grand Jury found that annual overtime costs had roughly doubled from $29 million in FY19 to more than $52 million projected in FY25, and that money previously earmarked for critical improvements had been redirected to cover overtime.
That is not merely a bookkeeping problem.
It is a statement of political values.
San Francisco found the money to keep an overstretched custodial system running on exhaustion. It found the money for enforcement pressure. It found the money to absorb growing populations inside crumbling institutions. What it did not find — at least not with anything like the same urgency — was the stable investment necessary to build independent oversight capacity, protect people in custody, and confront the daily lived consequences of confinement before lawsuits made them impossible to ignore.
This is where the Palmer contradiction becomes politically revealing.
Public officials could posture aggressively around one controversial oversight figure while a much larger institutional scandal was being financed in plain sight. Tens of millions in overtime. Chronic understaffing. Women alleging degrading treatment. A jail population with intense psychiatric needs. A Grand Jury warning of crisis. An oversight regime losing staff and credibility. If that does not produce the same level of heat as a scandal attached to a single man, then the issue is not lack of information. It is lack of will.
THE CITY’S MORAL ACCOUNTING
Part I argued that San Francisco did not end homelessness. It moved it.
Part II identifies one place many of those moved lives ended up: inside a county jail system already in visible decline.
And once there, especially for women in County Jail No. 2, the experience was not merely one of confinement. It was, according to the complaints and lawsuits now on the public record, one of deprivation, degradation, and trauma compounded by a citywide failure of accountability.
The most damning fact is not that these women suffered.
It is that San Francisco had already been warned.
Warned by the rising jail population.
Warned by the staffing crisis.
Warned by exploding overtime.
Warned by the failures of oversight.
Warned by the people inside.
Warned by the City’s own Civil Grand Jury.
Yet the women still had to sue.
That should shame every institution involved.
The Board of Supervisors, if it wants to prove that its concern is justice and not just theater, must show more courage confronting the conditions inside the Sheriff’s jails than it has shown chasing one controversial public figure. Sheriff Paul Miyamoto, if he wants to speak credibly about safety and care, must answer for a system in which women say they were denied dignity and subjected to abuse. And Mayor Daniel Lurie, if he wants the public to accept lower encampment numbers as evidence of progress, must explain why the institutions receiving the human fallout of his city’s enforcement strategy were already at the edge of collapse.
The women of County Jail No. 2 did not ask to become symbols.
They asked to be treated as human beings.
San Francisco’s response to them will reveal far more about this city than any press conference about cleaner sidewalks ever could.
SOURCE LIST
1. San Francisco Civil Grand Jury, When Making Do Doesn’t Work: San Francisco Jails in Crisis https://media.api.sf.gov/documents/2026_CGJ_Report_When_Making_Do_Doesnt_Work_-_San_Francisco_Jails_in_Crisis.pdf
2. Mission Local, Women sue SF jail over poor conditions, allege disparities with men https://missionlocal.org/2026/06/women-sf-jail-unhealthy-conditions-disparities-lawsuit/
3. ABC7 News, 9 inmates sue San Francisco, alleging jail conditions led to serious health problems https://abc7news.com/post/9-inmates-sue-san-francisco-alleging-jail-conditions-led-serious-health-problems/19272334/
4. KQED, Advocates Demand Investigation After Women Say SF Jail Deputies Recorded Strip Searches https://www.kqed.org/news/12065232/advocates-demand-investigation-after-women-say-sf-jail-deputies-recorded-strip-searches
5. KQED, 20 Women Sue SF Sheriff’s Office Over Alleged Mass Strip Search https://www.kqed.org/news/12084968/20-women-sue-sf-sheriffs-office-over-alleged-mass-strip-search
6. SF Public Press, Trauma Inside San Francisco’s Women’s Jail https://www.sfpublicpress.org/trauma-inside-san-franciscos-womens-jail/
7. Mission Local, Prosecutors drop rape charges against SF commissioner William Palmer https://missionlocal.org/2024/04/prosecutors-drop-rape-charges-against-sf-commissioner-william-palmer/
8. San Francisco Public Defender, All Charges Dismissed Against William Palmer, SF Sheriff’s Dept. Oversight Board Member https://sfpublicdefender.org/2024/04/03/all-charges-dismissed-against-william-palmer-sf-sheriffs-dept-oversight-board-member/
9. The Voice, William Palmer arrested for false imprisonment and battery a year after district attorney dropped charges in sodomy case https://thevoicesf.org/william-palmer-arrested-for-false-imprisonment-and-battery-a-year-after-district-attorney-dropped-charges-in-sodomy-case/
10. Davis Vanguard, The Difficult Journey Which Led to My Enlightenment and Healing Inside the San Francisco County Jail https://davisvanguard.org/2025/07/mental-health-care-jail/
11. Davis Vanguard, Mayor Daniel Lurie Advances ‘The State’s’ War on the Homeless in San Francisco https://davisvanguard.org/2025/05/sf-lurie-homeless-encampments/
12. Mission Local, S.F. sheriff set to blow past overtime budget by nearly 50% https://missionlocal.org/2026/03/sf-sheriff-department-overtime-budget/
13. SF.gov, Sheriff’s Department Oversight Board 2025 Q1 Report https://www.sf.gov/sheriffs-department-oversight-board-2025-q1-report
14. KQED, San Francisco Task Force Recommends Axing Sheriff Oversight Board https://www.kqed.org/news/12053019/luries-task-force-recommends-axing-sf-sheriff-oversight-board
15. KQED, Inaugural Member of SF Sheriff’s Oversight Board Resigns, Citing Agency’s General Dysfunction https://www.kqed.org/news/12014666/inaugural-member-of-sf-sheriffs-oversight-board-resigns-citing-agencys-general-dysfunction
16. Grand Jury Report on San Francisco Jails June 2006
https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/publications/grand-jury-report-on-san-francisco-jails-june-2006
17. San Francisco Board of Supervisors – 2003-2004 San Francisco Civil Grand Jury Report, San Francisco Sheriff’s Department Grievances: A Solution
Our Song and Video is dedicated to our Sisters and Brothers houses inside San Francisco Jails
Keyshia Cole – Heaven Sent
