SANTA CRUZ, Calif. -- The Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office will likely tweak its jail policy after an inmate escaped from its medium-security facility in Watsonville last week.
Sheriff's officials said Richard Sasse, 28, manipulated a locked door and escaped through the kitchen last Thursday night. He was in the Rountree Detention Facility awaiting sentencing on a litany of charges, including carjacking, burglary and armed robbery, according to the sheriff's office.
Jail officials currently classify an inmate when he or she is first brought into custody. Sasse was assigned to the medium-security facility in December and, until last week, sheriff's officials said he had not caused any problems.
Sheriff's Sgt. Steve Carney said the jail will likely shift its policy and continuously assess inmates' classifications while they remain in custody. It will "probably just expand their already in-place mental health assessment and expand it more towards individual inmate assessments," he said.
In Sasse's case, Carney said prison realignment may have played a role by reducing the jail's options for managing its population. Realignment went into effect last October, the result of a push to reduce state prison populations by shifting responsibility for low-level offenders to county jails.
Before realignment, Carney said a medium facility inmate could have stayed at the main jail, with that option acting as a sort of relief mechanism. "Now the facility is so full that we will follow the guideline of the classification and move them to a medium environment," he said.
Investigators are exploring the possibility that Sasse planned his escape after a court hearing where he learned he could be in custody longer than he expected. Carney said it doesn't appear that Sasse is still in the county, but detectives are continuing to follow-up on leads.
