Carolyn Fath Ashby
Dane County recently spent more than $4 million on repairs at the City County Building jail, but Sheriff Dave Mahoney says the facility “still isn’t safe.”
By 2024, Madison will likely have a new addition to its skyline: An eight-story tower to house the incarcerated, part of a $150-million plan to overhaul the Dane County jail system.
The new tower will be located behind the Public Safety Building on East Wilson Street, which will be remodeled as part of the “Jail Consolidation Project.” Even though the cost of the project has nearly doubled in recent months, it’s expected to sail through the Dane County Board on June 6.
Josh Wescott, chief of staff to Dane County Executive Joe Parisi, says his office has been preparing for years to take on the unprecedented capital expenditure.
“One thing everybody agrees on is nobody wants to spend this much money on a jail,” Wescott tells Isthmus. He says the expense of the new jail will mean more scrutiny for other county projects. “It will definitely put the capital budget process in tougher consideration each year.”
Including interest, the project will cost $225 million, which the average household in the county will pay $50 per year for the next two decades to fund.
The proposal was approved by the Personnel and Finance Committee on May 28.
There is a vocal minority that is dead set against a new jail. The Derail the Jail group is asking the community to voice its dissent at public meetings. Activists see investing in a new jail as perpetuating well-documented racial disparities in the criminal justice system. Progressive Dane also opposes a new jail.
The new jail project would reduce the total number of beds in the jail system from 1,013 to 922. Supv. Sharon Corrigan, chair of the county board, says the jail population has been reduced by 41 percent since 2007.
“We are counting on reducing the jail population further. We have to continue those efforts to make this project work,” says Corrigan. “We are reducing the total number of beds in the jail despite being one of the most rapidly growing counties in the state.”
A handful of Dane County supervisors still question whether the project is needed. Supv. Yogesh Chawla says the county should be making every effort to divert people from existing jail facilities before moving forward with the expensive project.
“We really need to be looking at who is in jail and who should really be sitting in a public health facility,” says Chawla. “I think there is a lot more work we can do on this.”
Sheriff Dave Mahoney supports “any effort to divert people from the jail.” But he says tens of millions have already been spent on numerous consultant studies and the county must deal with the aging facilities. “This just has to be done, there’s no getting around it,” says Mahoney. “If we kick this can down the road once again, the cost to taxpayers will only go up further.”
If this all sounds familiar, it should. Currently, inmates are housed at the Public Safety Building, the top two floors of the City County Building, and at the Ferris Center on Rimrock Road, where inmates participating in the Huber work release program are held.
After years of planning and debate, the county board approved a $76 million jail project in 2017. That plan would have consolidated jail operations downtown by adding four floors to the Public Safety Building and remodeling the existing jail in the same building.
But in October, officials learned the 30-year-old Public Safety Building can’t support four additional floors — despite being designed to do so. So, another $186,000 was spent revising the plan. In April, consultants provided four additional options to accomplish the same goals as the project approved in 2017. The cheapest option — which is still $74 million more than the old plan — calls for the eight-story tower behind the Public Safety Building. Two county committees unanimously approved that plan with little debate on May 21.
Once the tower is built, the Ferris Center and the City County Building jail would be closed. Since he was elected in 2006, Mahoney has been urging officials to shutter the 66-year-old jail on the top two floors of the city hall, calling it an “Alcatraz-style” jail that is “inhumane and dangerous.”
The county recently spent more than $4 million on the City County Building jail, which included replacing malfunctioning locks that regularly trapped inmates in their cells. Mahoney says those repairs were needed to get through the next couple of years but the facility “still isn’t safe.”
“We’ve replaced the locks but other mechanisms in the doors fail. We still have linear bars that are being used in several suicide attempts each month,” says Mahoney. “There are electrical issues. There are still the lead pipes that are resulting in a high lead count in the water that is being consumed by individuals in that building.”
Corrigan doesn’t plan on waiting until three new supervisors are sworn in from special elections in June to vote on the project. This includes the successor to Supv. Mary Kolar, who represented the area where the new jail will be located, but resigned earlier this year to join Gov. Tony Evers’ administration.
“If this was a brand new issue or it had been a fairly close vote in the past, that would be one thing,” Corrigan says. “The price tag is higher but we are approving the same plan we did in 2017. The plan that we are funding hasn’t changed.”
The new jail will change how solitary confinement is used and provide medical and mental health facilities that currently don’t exist. Mahoney says it will usher in “a completely different philosophy of corrections.” The new facility will allow programming space to be created in order to address “the core reasons people enter the criminal justice system,” Mahoney says.
Chawla would like to delay the vote until September when the results of a $140,000 study on the accessibility of mental health services in Dane County is due. The study was put in this year’s budget to identify gaps in mental health care services and the viability of creating a crisis response center that could potentially divert people from being brought to the jail.
“How do we make this kind of decision without all the options in front of us?” Chawla asks. “If this project was just dealing with the City County Building that would have a narrower scope. This is a massive consolidation of all the facilities that we have. The scope is so much broader than just that one facility.”
During the Personnel and Finance Committee meeting on May 28, protesters against the proposal got in a shouting match with Supv. Patrick Miles. After the committee unanimously approved the measure, protesters chanted “shame.”
“You all are shameful as fuck,” shouted one woman at the meeting. “You all have just invested in the death of black and brown people. Are you proud of that shit?”
Activist Nino Rodriguez mocks the jail consolidation project as “safer cages.” He’s circulating a letter against the jail and encouraging people to send it to their county supervisor. “With some of the worst racial disparities in the country, is this what we want the largest project in Dane County history to be?” states the letter.
But Mahoney insists that no diversion effort would allow the closure of the maximum security jail at the City County Building.
“We are already doing programming that diverts people suffering from mental illness for non-violent offenses. The vast, vast majority of people who are ending up in jail now have committed crimes that require them to be in jail,” says Mahoney. “While they are in our custody, we have a moral and ethical responsibility to house them safely and to care for them.”
Mahoney says if this project doesn’t pass the county board on June 6, “it will be a vote in favor of continuing to house people with mental health issues and medical conditions in solitary confinement.
“It will be a vote to support a failed system,” Mahoney adds. “There’s no in between here.”
[Editor's note: This article was edited to note that the jail proposal was approved by the county's Personnel and Finance Committee on May 28.]
