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Cautionary jails: Deconstructing the three “C”s Stay Informed

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by Emmett Sanders, February 20, 2024
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Arapahoe County, Colorado, is expanding its jail just four years after taxpayers
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sensitivity to the need to treat rather than warehouse people with addiction
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issues; the sheriff claims, “people’s needs have changed.” $30 million will come
from COVID-19 pandemic relief funds; 1 as the ACLU notes, using relief funds
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Similar arguments are being used to justify jail construction all around the
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millions of dollars from community-based resources, and saddling citizens with
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decades of tax liability. New jail construction projects regularly fail to meet
promises, leaving communities to deal with the aftermath. Drawing from
examples across the country, we break down three common arguments for jail
construction, discuss how they have been used to build or expand jails, and
highlight how reinvesting in cages is not a solution to social problems like crime
and substance use.

The three “C’s” of jail construction arguments

Jail proponents usually rely on one or more of three central arguments to make
their case:

The “Capacity” argument: a bigger jail is required to house everyone being

incarcerated in the jurisdiction;

The “Contemporary” argument: new construction is needed to update an

outdated jail;

The “Compassionate” argument: new construction is necessary to treat

incarcerated people more humanely. 2

On a surface level, these three “C” arguments are compelling because they speak
to very real issues. What these arguments often overlook, however, is that these
issues are largely driven by bad policies that have drastically expanded
reliance on packing people in cages. Essentially, the prevailing claim is that the
only way to solve the problem of incarceration is to expand our ability to
incarcerate — when in fact, communities would be better served by shrinking
jail populations. This sunk cost fallacy often leaves communities without real
solutions and holding the bag for decades.

If you build it… (the “capacity” argument)

Proponents of jail construction often rely upon jail “needs assessments” 3 to
bolster their claim that building a bigger jail is the only way to meet capacity
needs. These needs assessments come with many biases and flaws — often
because they are written by construction firms who hope to eventually make
even more money building the new jail. The simple truth is that no jail will ever
be big enough to satisfy an over-reliance on incarcerate-first policies. Instead
of solving capacity needs, bigger jails enable counties to continue bad practices
— leading them to argue that they need newer, even bigger jails in the future,
and spending millions of dollars in the process.

Greene County, Missouri, for instance, built a new 552-bed jail in 2001. This
was supposed to resolve their capacity needs for at least a decade; however,
within just 2 years, the jail had surpassed capacity again. Despite increasing bed
space by remodeling and by adding a trailer jail annex, the continuation of bad
policies, such as criminalizing poverty by rounding up and arresting unhoused
people, led to what a 2017 needs assessment called “unsustainable” jail growth,
which forced another $150 million 1,252-bed expansion in 2020.

Similarly, Lubbock County, Texas, spent $94.5 million in taxpayer bonds

building a new 1,512-bed jail, which opened in 2010. Though intended to meet
their capacity needs well into the future, jail population growth has persisted,
leading county officials to spend a million dollars of the county’s budget
incarcerating people in other counties. But there are other obvious solutions to
Lubbock’s over-incarceration problem. Lubbock County mostly uses its jail to
house people who haven’t been convicted of a crime; in January of 2024, 76% of
the jail’s population were people being held pretrial, and fully one tenth of the
people in the jail were being held pretrial for a misdemeanor. Pretrial detention
practices play a huge part in the county’s perpetual capacity problems. County
officials have nevertheless repeatedly looked to build their way out of these
issues instead of implementing sustainable policy changes like ending pretrial
detention for misdemeanors and reexamining alternatives to cash bond. As a
result, Lubbock’s sheriff recently proposed a 996-bed expansion projected to
cost taxpayers another $464 million, bringing the total to more than half a
billion dollars, with no substantial policy change in sight.

While capacity arguments are often used to justify jail expansion, the truth is
counties cannot build their way out of capacity issues without addressing the
policies that created them in the first place. Despite claims that jail construction
is driven by need, in many instances, the reverse is actually true. As Greene
County’s assessment noted, “The dramatic increase in bookings is probably due
[in part to] the increased availability of beds with the opening of the new jail.”
Simply put, if you build it, they will fill it.

Box office bombs (the “contemporary” argument)

Often, the promise of a shiny new jail with updated facilities leads to over-
budget projects that sap taxpayer money far into the future. These projects,
focused on building jails with “all the bells and whistles,” often collide with
soaring construction costs. This can sometimes lead to facilities that are too
costly to staff and maintain or even too costly to complete. As a result, projects
can wind up half-finished or sitting empty for years at taxpayer expense.

Despite voters rejecting an $88 million bond initiative to fund a new jail in
2004, by 2008, Thurston County, Washington, accepted a bid for “the
cutting-edge $45 million Accountability and Restitution Center (ARC) jail
complex,” a building some have referred to as the “Taj Mahal design of Jail, Law
and Justice Centers.” Finished in 2010, the jail sat empty for 6 years, costing the
taxpayers roughly $430,000 annually, largely because the county did not budget
for the additional staff needed to run it. Just three years later, the county would
approve a $19-25 million jail expansion featuring a 40-bed “‘flex unit’ with cells
that could be used in different ways as needs change” plus a shell for future
expansion.

In Wayne County, Michigan, construction began on a “state-of-the-art”

$300 million, 2,192-bed jail in 2011. The design included innovations that some
claimed would bolster security, largely by further restricting movement. By
2013, the project was already $91 million over budget due to ballooning
construction costs, forcing it to be abandoned and leading to the indictment of
three Wayne County Officials for lying about the project’s cost. The jail sat
incomplete and empty for years, costing the taxpayers around $1 million per
month just to maintain.

Though not a jail, Thomson Prison in Illinois shares a similar story. Built in
2001 for $145 million, this new high-tech maximum-security prison sat empty at
the taxpayers’ expense for 11 years due to state budgetary restraints impacting
the ability to staff it before finally being sold to the federal government 4 in
2012.

As these examples illustrate, officials often claim that a new “modern” jail will
solve a jurisdiction’s problems. While the drumbeat here is safety or security,
these projects almost invariably also include millions for expanding bed space to
incarcerate more people. Moreover, while huge amounts of money are poured
into building bigger, better, and newer buildings, the massive costs associated
with staffing and operating these monstrosities, and the fact that existing
prisons and jails around the country are dangerously understaffed as it is, can
result in costly projects that can’t be staffed even if they are completed. These
monuments to incarceration can sit empty for years, draining the public coffer.

Promises, promises (the “compassionate” argument)

Increasingly, counties cite the need to be compliant with ADA requirements or
the idea that jails should be providers of mental health services or substance use
treatment as reasons to expand. This “compassionate” argument repackages
incarceration as care and can mean taking money away from health services in
the community. This is particularly problematic when jails fail to deliver on
these promises, as they regularly do.

McLean County, Illinois’ 2015 jail needs assessment called for more space
for housing people with mental health needs. In response, the county spent
$43.5 million to build a new jail with a “Community Crisis Stabilization Facility”
in 2017. A few short years later, however, people with mental health concerns
are once again being held in the booking area (a practice the new jail was
supposed to end) and are being held at jails outside of the county, unable to
“benefit” from McLean’s new $43.5 million carceral alternative to community-
based crisis intervention.

Broome County, New York, similarly promised to provide better medical

care as part of its argument to secure $6.8 million to expand its jail in 2015. 5
But once the new jail was built, there was little effort to deliver on this promise:
Broome County maintained the same dubious medical provider, Correctional
Medical Care (CMC), that had been sued multiple times for medical negligence
6 from 2010 all the way until 2022. Many of these claims involved jail deaths.

CMC’s practices were so bad that the New York State Commission on
Corrections’ Medical Review Board chastised the company for “egregious lapses
in medical care” in their 2018 “Problematic Jails” report. More incarcerated
people died in the five years after ground broke on jail expansion than in the five
years before, during CMC’s contract tenure with Broome County. 7

People interested in improving the lives of incarcerated people are often swayed
by “compassionate” arguments. But they should never lose sight of the fact that
incarceration itself is inherently harmful to physical and mental health, leaving
many with a PTSD-like condition called Post-Incarceration Syndrome, which
can even trigger drug use. At best, jail as a place of treatment is ineffectual. At
worst, these bad policies drain funding from community-based support systems
that can address challenges before a crisis results in incarceration. Jail is a place
of trauma, not healing.

Change — The other “C”

While these three C’s are often used to argue for jail construction, advocates can
and should confront their local officials with real solutions for reducing jail
populations and providing mental health and substance use care.

Reduce pretrial detention: Nationwide, 83% of people in jails have not

been convicted of a crime. One of the most effective ways to bring down jail
populations is to reform the way court systems treat people accused of
crimes. Policies ranging from citation and release to ending cash-based
pretrial detention can massively reduce jail capacity needs without raising
taxes, incarcerating more people, or jeopardizing public safety.

Focus on community-based care: Jail was never intended to be a

provider of social services. As the Justice LA Coalition successfully argued in
opposition to a $2 billion mental health-focused jail in 2019, true
compassion comes not in the trauma of a cell but in funding for community-
based care and support for those with addiction issues or mental health
needs.

Reduce total jail capacity: If jail construction absolutely cannot be

avoided (as in the case of places under court orders to update or build a new
facility), it should be contained so that it does not expand the capacity of the
current jail to incarcerate or invest in new carceral technologies. If there’s no
way to avoid building a new jail, advocates can at least work on making sure
the new one doesn’t expand the number of people behind bars.

Conclusion
Though common arguments in favor of jail expansion are compelling at first
glance, investing in jail construction is not a solution to social problems but
rather doubling down on policies that caused these problems to begin with that
can burden a community for decades to come. Ultimately, many of these
arguments can be answered by asking pointed questions, revising policies, and
being responsive to the community’s actual needs.

Footnotes

1. Congress passed the American Relief Plan Act (ARPA) in 2021. Though this
act allotted $350B to help state and local governments recover from the
economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, many jurisdictions have used
this money to expand and build new jails and prisons. ↩

2. As Vera notes in their exhaustive 2019 report, which identifies similar

arguments and touches on many of the issues here, jurisdictions may also be
motivated by “financial incentives.”
Read theThis can mean increasing jail size to keep
footnotes
from renting bed space from other places or even increasing their ability to
Emmett Sanders is a Policy and Advocacy Associate at the Prison Policy Initiative. (Other articles | Full bio |
Contact)

Related briefings:

1. Smoke and mirrors: A cautionary tale for counties considering a big, costly
new jail +

2. Taking the fight against jail and prison expansion on the offensive +

3. Don’t sink more funds into jails for women +

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