New Jail?

What do you do with hardened, scary misdemeanor criminals when there's no room in the county jail? Create new programs that focus on counseling, job training, and other rehabilitative services? Feed cash to community centers and mentoring programs that help head off the problem before it starts? No, stupid, you build more jails.

Says the P-I:

Cities [around King County] have responded in a variety of ways -- through adopting alternatives to incarceration, including home monitoring, and housing some inmates in jails in Yakima and other areas.

But most city leaders agree that eventually new jails will be needed and that they should be spread around a south and north collection of cities.

Jails are a lucrative business. We've seen the documentaries, we've attended the talks. This was one of our pet topics to fume about back in the day when we fumed about things and demonstrated against things. In one of our most memorable moments, we sat in a community center in New Orleans and listened to former prisoners talk about having been incarcerated for decades only to finally have access to DNA evidence that proved they were innocent. We got chills as we listened to the heartfelt, empowered words of Angela Davis talking about the Prison Industrial Complex and its role in the lives of the young and poor and non-white.

But those were discussions about how to rehabilitate, re-teach, re-train, re-inspire seriously hardened criminals (or people who were mistaken as such). Here, we're talking about people who have committed misdemeanors. Graffiti, for example. Bar fights, being too drunk in public. The sorts of crimes that arise out of boredom, frustration, a momentary lapse in judgment, peer pressure. Personally, we'd rather see the $110 million it'll cost to build the new jail—followed by the $18.4 million/year it'll cost to run it—go to the schools, parks, and assistance for parents and families.

photo from Seattlest Flickr user sonek321