Several dozen members of the Rotary Club of Eureka went to jail today. Voluntarily. The local business leaders were given a lunchtime tour of the Humboldt County Correctional Facility, better known as the county jail, starting with lunches served in styrofoam to-go containers.

The Rotarians dined inside one of the jail’s general population dormitories, a vast, open room where a single officer can supervise as many as 75 inmates at a time. After the Rotarians ate — and after the Pledge of Allegiance and an invocation — various officers took turns explaining how things work in the Pink House.

Before the 1997 construction of the current jail, which is the county’s largest building, boasting eight floors and 155,000 square feet, the jail was located inside the adjacent county courthouse. As Sgt. Lesa Christensen explained to the group, the old jail was managed under the traditional “linear” model, with long rows of cells checked periodically by supervising officers.

That model led to overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and inconsistent supervision, which created more behavioral problems, Christensen said. The current jail uses a “direct supervision” model, where lower-risk inmates are allowed to interact under the constant watch of at least one officer.

Since that change was made — and especially after California’s “public safety realignment” with AB 109 — county jails have focused more on rehabilitation, running programs aimed at changing people’s behavior. The jail now offers such programs as GED and college-level courses, substance abuse counseling, mental health services and even knitting and crochet lessons. (The hats and scarves are often donated to charity, the officers explained.)

But there are still plenty of challenges. “Realignment has really changed the climate in the jail,” Captain Ed Wilkinson explained to the Outpost before the tour. Guys who have spent years in prison are now being housed locally, sometimes for years at a stretch. “A lot of them are trying to play prison politics,” Wilkinson said, referring to the pervasive prison culture of racially segregated gangs.

Officers now receive more training in defensive tactics and riot response, “things we never thought we’d need,” Wilkinson said.

With the passage of Prop. 47 last year the jail population has gone way down, with low-level drug offenders granted immediate release from their sentences. Today the jail houses almost 100 fewer inmates than it did a year ago, Wilkinson said.

With the direct supervision model, suicides and assaults on staff have gone down, Christensen said. But there are still violent incidents, she added. A few inmates will try to distract the guard on duty while others take someone off to be beaten. There’s even a gang formed in Fortuna — known as CWB, or “Crazy White Boys” — that’s earning a reputation for itself in the California prison system, according to Corporal Adam Rossiter.

In the general population dorms these violent outbursts are known as “taking them to the bathroom,” Christensen said. When there’s an incident, officers call in a “Code 3,” signifying an emergency, and within seconds as many as dozen officers can be on the scene.

During a question-and-answer period, a woman in the crowd asked a couple of pointed questions about the rehabilitation and vocational training offered to inmates. Her own mother has served time, she explained. “We need to talk about how hard it is to get a job” after serving time, she said. “It’s good all you Rotarians are here,” she added, suggesting that the local business owners can do more to help people get their lives back on track.

The officers said such rehabilitation is exactly the intent nowadays. “It used to be, ‘Lock ’em up, throw away the key,’” Wilkinson said. “But that was not working.”

The county is currently focused on an expansion of the jail facility. Rotarian and Eureka City Councilmember Marian Brady asked why the expansion was needed, considering the decline in the jail’s population, and the captain said the increased space will provide more room for programs designed to help in the rehabilitation process.