The Sheriff Behind Bars

Dressed in a drab orange jumpsuit and rubber shower sandals, the trim, boyish-looking prisoner at the San Mateo, Calif., jail last week behaved pretty much like any other convict. He watched television through the bars, did occasional push-ups on his cell floor, read some books. The inmate was hardly typical, however. He was Richard Hongisto, 40, sheriff of San Francisco County, playing Robin Hood rather than sheriff of Nottingham, and serving five days for contempt of court. It was, as far as anyone could determine, the first time in California history an incumbent sheriff had been sent to jail.

Hongisto's crime was his repeated failure to evict 70 tenants, most of them poor, elderly Filipinos, from a seedy residential hotel in San Francisco's Chinatown. A Thailand-based corporate owner has wanted for several years to raze the hotel to make way for a more profitable development, but the residents have asserted a right to stay put. The controversy has become a cause celebre among local liberals and civil rights activists. Three eviction orders were issued in late 1976, but Hongisto avoided carrying them out by pleading that his deputies would be unable to handle the disorder an eviction would provoke. As many as 10,000 protesters might face the ten men he could assign to the job, Hongisto claimed, and "there was a great potential for bloodshed."

Those excuses did not move Superior Court Judge John E. Benson, who fined Hongisto $500 and ordered him jailed. Perhaps suspecting that the sheriff might get favored treatment in his own jail, Benson specified the nearby San Mateo lockup "for reasons of safety." This upset Hongisto, who has long campaigned for prison reform. Benson, he said, "is either a liar or a hypocrite when he suggests I wouldn't be safe in my own jail." When the California Supreme Court refused to hear the case, Hongisto packed a bag, ceremoniously put a flower in his lapel and checked into the pokey the very next morning.

As county sheriff (since 1972), ex-Policeman Hongisto has no law-enforcement-patrol functions, but supervises a 313-officer staff whose jobs include guarding seven jails and supplying bailiffs for 47 courts. Nonetheless, Hongisto has endeared himself to the city's sizable liberal, black and gay communities by attacking a variety of Establishment figures: judges (for alleged laziness and "three-hour lunches"), county supervisors (for scrimping on the jail food and maintenance budgets) and, privately, some of his own deputies (for their attitudes toward prisoners). He also improved medical care, drug counseling, educational opportunities and recreation at his lockups. Despite conservatives' resentment of his freewheeling regime, Hongisto won re-election to his $32,744-a-year post in 1975 with nearly 50% of the vote in a four-man field.

During his jail stint, Hongisto browsed in the essays of Francis Bacon and The Essential Works of John Stuart Mill; he is working on a Ph.D. in criminology at Berkeley. He pronounced the San Mateo food better than at his own slammers, chatted with prisoners about an attempted escape, and discov ered why convicts constantly exercise ("It's not for macho image--they're confined and don't want to get fat"). When he emerged to the cheers of 150 supporters, Hongisto declared the experience invaluable: "It's like sex. You have to do it to really know what it is."

His delaying tactics on the hotel eviction may help the residents to take control of the building. While the sheriff was stalling, the city of San Francisco allocated $1.3 million to purchase the structure through condemnation. Though the matter is currently tied up in court, the city eventually plans to turn the hotel over to a nonprofit corporation to be directed by the tenants.

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