Santa Clara County has released a slew of recommendations to help reduce the jail population — focusing heavily on mental health efforts — but some criminal justice reform advocates assert they don’t go far enough and won’t create any meaningful change.

The recommendations — presented to the board this past week — ranged from reducing the time people spend in custody by adding more people to conduct mental health assessments and creating a less criminally focused mental health facility to increasing access to social support systems for individuals leaving jail.

Supervisor Susan Ellenberg had asked that the county come up with some alternatives to incarceration last year when the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors was reviewing whether to move forward with a $390 million proposed jail. Since September, a group of advocates, members of law enforcement, county officials and other directly impacted individuals have met to develop a set of eight recommendations and 36 strategies on the topic.

But criminal justice reform advocates — some of whom were a part of the working group — said the recommendations didn’t create significant policy changes and focused mostly on existing programs.

After reviewing the recommendations, Raj Jayadev, the founder of Silicon Valley DeBug, told the Mercury News that he feels the working group wasn’t a “serious initiative.”

“If you look at the recommendations, they are really just restating what the county is doing with the status quo,” he said. “It’s essentially saying do more of what we’re doing around reentry or people having early representation or early contact with the court or if it does move into something that could actually be forward thinking and have some impact, it’s really general and vague without any real detailed timeline analysis on resources required.”

Alicia Chavez, another member of Silicon Valley DeBug who served on the working group, thought the decisions were largely being driven by “the county and system players.”

“It felt like it was going toward a topic that didn’t necessarily fit in with the theme around alternatives to incarceration,” she said. “They talked a lot about mental health, which is a topic we need to talk about, but it’s not necessarily the space for alternatives to incarceration because the folks that they’re talking about don’t need to be incarcerated in the first place.”

Instead, some advocates want the Santa Clara County Superior Court to reinstate zero dollar bail for nonviolent offenders — which was in place during the height of the pandemic and ended in July 2022 — and allow defendants subject to arrest warrants to calendar their court dates. Right now, the only way they can appear in court for their arraignment is by posting cash bail or, if they can’t afford bail, surrendering to jail for several days ahead of their hearing.

On June 5, Silicon Valley DeBug, Stanford Law School and the ACLU’s Northern California chapter sent a letter to the courts demanding they reinstate zero dollar bail and allow defendants to calendar their court dates, stating that the current policy is unconstitutional.

In an email, a spokesperson for the court said, “the same challenge was already presented to the 6th District Court of Appeal, which denied the request.”

Addressing the criticism, Ellenberg said advocates are just doing their job, “which is to push us faster to go farther.”

The supervisor said she was “a bit surprised” the recommendations focused so heavily on mental health since the county has already been doing work in that area.

“I thought maybe we would see recommendations around ways to keep more people safely in the community pending disposition of their cases when mental health was not an issue, but there were other reasons people could remain safely in the community perhaps with additional community support,” she said. “The beauty of community engagement is you follow where it leads you.”

While the recommendations faced criticisms from some criminal justice reform advocates, not all of the working group’s members thought they would be ineffective.

David Ball, a law school professor at Santa Clara University who has been opposed to the county building a new jail, said the recommendations were a good first step but the county needs to constantly be discussing new recommendations.

“We’re not going to be able to solve any of these really complicated problems in six months no matter who is on the task force,” he said. “This has got to be an ongoing process. We didn’t get into being the most incarcerated community that’s ever been on the face of the Earth overnight, and we’re not going to get out of it overnight.”

County officials are currently reviewing the recommendations, which are expected to come back to the Board of Supervisors later this year with plans on how to implement them.