We’re a week away from the November election. In Johnson County, Iowa, our most important vote concerns the proposal for a bond to build a new jail. And it’s long past time for me to say a word about it.
I’m voting ‘no’ on the proposal, and I’ll say why. I’ll finish by critically analyzing the arguments from both the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ campaigns.
Neither side has argued well. Maybe that’s par for the course. But to me, it’s more evidence of the degeneration of our politics into subcultural signaling.
Why I’m Voting ‘No’
One thing I said above isn’t quite true. We won’t be voting next week on a proposal to build a new jail. Rather, the ballot asks us whether we want to fund whichever plan local officials choose.
That’s significant.
First, I don’t trust local officials to select a proposal. As a voter, I want to vote on a proposal. I don’t want to write an effectively blank check.
In practice, Johnson County exists as a one-party state. Democrats win every partisan office. And with only a few minor exceptions, Democratic voters remain unwilling to hold their elected officials accountable. In this case, Democrats refuse to pressure the sheriff and county attorney to take further steps to reduce the inmate population and ensure the dignity of inmates.
The county attorney could refuse to file charges in cases where the person under arrest presents little or no danger to the public. Cases like drug charges. Prosecutors pursue diversion, but they could expand beyond diversion into outright refusal to charge. Instead, they continue leveraging petty charges to maximize conviction rates and sentencing terms. We could also pursue a variety of ways to hold fewer people short-term.
Second, I want a proposal with a maximum of 120 beds. But the proposal supervisors favor allows for expansion to 140.
That’s too many. A better proposal would begin at 90-100 and allow for expansion up to 120.
20 beds makes a world of different in jail capacity and local politics. 90-100 sits near current average inmate population, and it maintains pressure on officials to continue reducing the incarceration rate. And with our one-party state, we hold few other levers for this pressure.
Common Arguments
Let’s turn to arguments from both sides. As I mentioned above, I’m not impressed by these arguments. Given that I’m a ‘no’ vote, I’ll pay extra attention to the arguments for my own vote.
I mean, I was trained as a philosopher. We’re always harder on our own side.
But let me first say a word about my orientation toward these issues.
I accept the need for a new jail facility in our county. I’m convinced by the reports showing that our current jail is in bad shape. And I do think we need to build out some of the additional features that a new jail would likely have.
In addition, I think putting people in jail in surrounding counties is bad for both policy and humanitarian reasons. It places people too far from their families. And it subjects them to the policies and whims of public officials from counties that align politically well to the right of Johnson County. It’s also stupidly expensive.
And so, I entered the debate open to voting either ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Neither side did much to move me closer to its position. Instead, supporters and opponents turned inward toward their own cliques and subcultures, offering arguments persuasive only to the already converted.
Without further ado, then, let’s look at some of the arguments for and against the bond proposal.
‘No’ Argument: We should adopt modern ‘abolitionism’ and work toward the long-term elimination of prisons and/or police. This means we should never increase jail capacity and should always work for its reduction, in preparation for a world where no one is in jail.
I’ve addressed ‘abolition‘ a number of times on my blog. I’m sympathetic to it in some forms. In short, I endorse (state and federal) prison abolition, in the sense of immediately eliminating private prisons and working toward the elimination of the prison industry. We should incarcerate only people who present an actual danger to the public. This represents maybe 10-20% or so of the people currently in state or federal prison.
Police abolition, however, is a different matter. I think we should radically transform what we ask police departments to do. But police departments will likely always be necessary in some form. We can play around with what we call them, but they’ll still be police. And so, I find ‘police abolition’ a slogan not worth marching behind.
Where does that leave us with respect to the local vote? The vast majority of prisoners sit in state prisons, not local jails. That’s where prison reduction should focus. While there are some things we can do to reduce local jail populations, those things fall well short of eliminating them.
So, I’m not very convinced by the abolitionist argument against a new county jail. At least not on its own. Instead, we have to look to actual conditions to see whether a new facility and/or additional capacity is warranted. I’m not willing to rule it out a priori in the way abolitionists want.
‘Yes’ Argument: The needs assessment says we need a 120-140 bed facility. So, we should build it.
The needs assessment does, indeed, say this. However, a needs assessment is only as good as the assumptions built into it.
Our needs assessment assumes that the incarceration rate won’t significantly decline and that Johnson County’s total population will continue growing. The latter assumption is almost certainly correct. Combined with the former point, it means we need more jail capacity.
The former, however, is a variable that could change. We can keep our inmate population in the ballpark of 100 by having a county attorney who takes the steps I listed above. The law allows a county attorney a nearly free hand at deciding whether to file charges, despite the local office’s repeated false denials of this point.
Our county attorney should exercise greater discretion over whether and when she files charges. And if she does so, the incarceration rate (and need for jail capacity) will drop.
‘No’ Argument: The sheriff violated the rights of a local inmate by holding him for ICE longer than legally specified. If we build a new jail, the sheriff will keep doing ICE’s bidding.
AND
‘Yes’ Argument: The sewer recently backed up at the jail facility. Look at how bad things are! We need to build a new jail.
I put these two arguments together because they’re both examples of a red herring fallacy.
Why? Both introduce an issue not relevant to the question of whether we should build a new jail. And they invite us to vote based on our reaction to that issue rather than the core issues of a jail campaign.
The problem with the ‘no’ argument is that the sheriff will continue working with ICE regardless of the outcome of the jail vote. Voting ‘no’ won’t deter him from holding people for ICE. And voting ‘yes’ won’t enable the activity. Those who use this argument are manipulating voters into making a judgment on the sheriff’s behavior rather than on the new facility.
On the surface, the ‘yes’ argument looks relevant. After all, poor conditions of the current facility are at issue, and a sewer backup is an example of poor conditions. But one sewer backup is hardly serious enough to require a $90+ million response. The overall conditions of the facility over a period of time are the relevant factor. Those who use this argument are manipulating voters into a ‘gut’ emotional reaction to raw sewage rather than on the need for a new facility.
‘No’ Argument: The falling incarceration rate means that we don’t need more than 65 (or 92, depending on which version of the argument we examine) beds in a jail facility. Therefore, we should reject any proposal that ever allows for more than 65 (again, or 92) beds.
To a degree, I sympathize with this argument. After all, I argued above that we can, with effort, keep our needs somewhere in the 90-100 range.
But the problem with this version of the argument is that it goes beyond what I was saying and instead gets into ‘magic math.’ Yes, our incarceration rate has been dropping. These declines happened in large part because our local officials made diversion efforts. But those efforts will never cut the incarceration rate to zero. As our county’s total population continues to increase, even very low incarceration rates will eventually require 90-100, or as many as 120, beds.
And so, we need new, more extraordinary efforts to keep incarceration rates dropping. It’s not going to just continue to do so in line with prior trends.
‘No’ advocates who use this argument strike me as sincere. The problem is that they’re just not groking the math.
‘Yes’ Argument: The current jail is cruel because it requires us to ship people off to live too far away from their families. So, we need a new jail with greater capacity.
The problem with this argument is obvious from what I’ve written above. Our local officials could take steps to incarcerate fewer people, which would help alleviate this problem. We could also build a facility with a more modest expansion of capacity, in conjunction with these steps, in order to solve the problem.
The bond proposal would, indeed, solve the problem the ‘yes’ side points to. But we could come up with a better solution to it. It doesn’t require us to build anything like what county officials want.
‘No’ Argument: We have racial disparities in our criminal justice system. Building additional jail capacity will make these racial disparities worse. Therefore, we shouldn’t build additional jail capacity.
As written, and taken literally, this is the worst argument for a ‘no’ vote.
Why?
We have pretty good evidence, widely acknowledged by organizations like the Urban League that criticize mass incarceration, that reducing mass incarceration alone won’t help with racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
But the situation is probably even worse than that. If anything, states that incarcerate more people actually tend to have less racial disparity than ones that incarcerate fewer people. This evidence is widely available and well known.
If ending racial disparity is the only goal, the best way to do that would be to incarcerate everyone.
Joking aside, the fact of the matter is that reducing racial disparity is a worthwhile goal we should pursue. But the steps we should take to pursue it aren’t at issue in a vote on a local jail bond.
‘No’ Argument: The proposal is too expensive. It costs so much that it would impede our ability to fund more important issues with a new bond, like housing and/or transit.
I’ll end with this argument, and I want to be careful with it.
In most versions, this argument is just badly concealed upper middle income tax politics. ‘Too expensive’ exists in that space as code for ‘I don’t want to pay more property taxes.’ Since I’m not impressed by that version, I’ll set it aside.
The version I want to discuss comes, instead, from a leftist perspective. Indeed, the person who first told it to me is a left-leaning elected official.
I’m sympathetic to the argument. I’d much rather vote for a bond that created a mixed-income public housing system and/or expanded our inadequate transit system than vote for a new jail.
But for this argument to work, its proponents need to show us what they’ve got. What’s the bond proposal that would fund housing and transit and function as an alternative? So far, they’ve just hinted at it. But to move votes, they need an actual proposal on the table.
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