Santa Rita Jail

Santa Rita Jail is a county jail located in Dublin, Alameda County, California adjacent to the Camp Parks Reserve Forces Training Area, and operated by the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. Santa Rita houses the majority of persons arrested in Alameda County, which occupies most of the East San Francisco Bay Area and includes the cities of Oakland, Berkeley, San Leandro and Alameda. Santa Rita is not the only prison facility in the vicinity as the Federal Correctional Institution, Dublin is located on the premises of Camp Parks.The original Santa Rita Jail was constructed in 1947 on a retired WWII training base near the current site. By 1983, overcrowding had become an issue, and plans were established for the construction of the current $172 million facility, which opened in 1989. Funding for the jail's construction was obtained through state bonds as well as local county matching funds.The current 113acre facility is laid out in a modern decentralized "campus" design, similar to many modern prisons, one-half mile long by one-quarter mile wide. The facility has 18 separate, self-contained housing units, a "core" building containing central booking, release and administration, and a service building containing the laundry, commissary, kitchen and warehouses. Santa Rita is the third largest jail in California and the fifth largest in the United States, and is considered a "mega-jail", specified to hold 4,000 prisoners at any one time, making it as large or larger than many California state prisons. Perhaps reflective of the Bay Area community that it serves, the jail incorporates several modern technological advances, and is touted by the Sheriff's Office as one of the most modern correctional facilities in the world. An automatic robotic cart system moves all meals, laundry, commissary items, supplies and garbage through the jail, allowing maximal restriction of prisoner movement throughout the facility. A 1.2 megawatt peak-power solar array was installed in Spring 2002 on the roofs of the housing units, supplying nearly one half of the jail's power demand during daylight hours. This solar array constitutes the largest such rooftop array in the Western Hemisphere. In May 2006, the Chevron Energy Solutions deployed a 1-megawatt fuel cell system that generates 8,000,000 kWh of electricity and 1.4 MMBtu of waste heat (50% and 18% of Jail's needs, respectively) from natural gas.