Web-JailFollowup-11-20-2017
Carolyn Fath
The Dane County Board is expected to vote on a $76 million jail proposal Monday night. The project has been debated for years and millions have been spent studying the county’s jail system. But that doesn’t mean there’s any consensus over what needs to be done.
Ahead of the vote, supporters and opponents continue disputing facts and what the county needs.
Dane County Sheriff Dave Mahoney and other supporters say the proposal — which would consolidate jail operations under one roof at the Public Safety Building — would create a safer, more humane facility. For the first time, the jail would have mental health and medical beds along with new programming space for inmates. And it would finally shutter the City County Building jail, which has been described as “inhumane and dangerous,” as well as the Ferris Center.
But anti-jail activists say the expensive new jail fails to address the real problem — racial and economic disparities and a corrupt criminal justice system that puts a disproportionate number of people of color behind bars. M Adams, a Derail the Jail activist with Freedom Inc., sums up the proposal this way: “A vote for the jail is a vote for racism.”
Isthmus outlined the dispute in a Nov. 16 article, “Reality check.” Nino Rodriguez, another Derail the Jail organizer, attacked the sheriff’s arguments from the article in a Facebook post: “Mahoney claims there are ‘factual errors’ in Derail the Jail's arguments. Let’s look at the FACTS.”
Ahead of the tonight’s vote, here are some of the central disagreements between the two sides:
Solitary confinement
In Isthmus’ Nov. 16 article, Mahoney said, “If the community wants to end solitary confinement, I need space to do that."
Rodriguez writes on Facebook that the $76 million jail proposal would more than double the number of isolation cells “with high-security doors and slots for food. These cells are designed to isolate people as much as possible, including during meals.” He goes on to claim “the jail proposal will drastically increase the capacity to cage people.”
There are currently 44 segregation cells at the Dane County jail (24 in the City County Building jail and 20 at the Public Safety Building). Mahoney doesn’t quibble that the number of individual cells would increase but says “solitary confinement, as we know it, will end once the replacement facility is completed.” The county doesn’t have a choice according to the sheriff. He says the Wisconsin Department of Corrections has outlawed solitary confinement — as it's currently used at the City County Building and Public Safety Building — in any new jails built in the state.
“Today, solitary confinement is spending 23-24 hours a day in a 6-foot-by-9-foot cell. You may be let out for one hour for phone calls and to shower. But if you’re not following the rules, you don’t get out even that one hour,” Mahoney says. “Currently, an individual could be locked in a cell, 24 hours a day, for days, weeks, months, however long you’re in the jail, for up to a year.”
The new jail facility will add 64 mental health beds and 128 medical beds, allowing for an alternative to housing these inmates in segregation cells.
“I won’t have to house people in solitary confinement who are going through heroin withdrawal, which I do today. If a transgender individual comes into the jail — and wants to be separated from other individuals — we will be able to accommodate that. Today, the only option is a solitary confinement cell,” Mahoney says. “If somebody is in a wheelchair, today the only place we have for them is solitary confinement. The replacement facility has an infirmary where I can house people with these needs. We will have options that we don’t currently have.”
For inmates with disciplinary issues, Mahoney says solitary confinement will be replaced with “administrative confinement.” Inmates will still be isolated from the general population but have access to a smaller, communal day room for 17 hours a day.
“There will be individual cells. Some in the community want to refer to that as solitary confinement. It’s not,” Mahoney says. “The replacement facility will fundamentally end solitary confinement. Nobody has to take my word for it. Legally, we can’t do what we are currently doing in the replacement facility.”
The 24 segregation cells at the City County Building will be replaced by 24 single individual cells called for in the jail proposal. However, Mahoney notes that the 20 segregation cells on the first floor of the Public Safety Building won’t fall under the administrative confinement standards until phase two of the jail project. That’s estimated to cost $24 million and is not included in the 2018 budget.
Cash bail
Derail the Jail activists have said that up to 22 percent of the people in the jail are there because of unpaid bail. Mahoney told Isthmus that was “pure fantasy.”
However, Rodriguez insists the figure is accurate. Rodriguez argues that a “group of Dane County judges and other officials produced the 22 percent estimate in 2014.” Referring to a Wisconsin State Journal article he says, “and even a more conservative estimate from 2016 shows that about 17 percent of people in the jail could be released if their bail were paid.”
The group has gone even further, repeatedly saying that “two-thirds” of inmates in the jail are being held for trivial reasons and could be “released tomorrow.”
Rodriguez says Mahoney’s statement is misleading because “the sheriff is focused on low bail amounts, which he keeps shifting, to deflect from the bigger issue.”
“Court officials have said that a significant amount of the jail population is there only because of unpaid bail amounts. We know it's not just low bail amounts. That’s not the point,” Rodriguez says. “The community could come together and get all those people out tonight, if the bail was paid. And if there was a public safety concern, the law says the court isn’t supposed to release them or to put conditions on release. So whatever the amount, it’s just unpaid bail keeping a lot of people behind bars. Not safety.”
But Mahoney says he is responding to “persistent criticism” that he’s jailing people because they are impoverished.
“When we begin hearing criticism about this, we started doing snapshot looks on why people were in the jail on any given day. There was nobody who was in on a $200 bail alone,” says Mahoney. “There may have been someone on a $200 bail but they also had a probation hold. So even if they posted bail, they wouldn’t get out. We have that kind of information in our database, the court commissioner does not.”
In 2009, Mahoney says the Sheriff’s Office even budgeted to pay low bail amounts for inmates who couldn’t afford it. But the bail fund was ended after then state Attorney General J. B. Van Hollen found the program unconstitutional.
“We have told several groups, if these individuals are truly sitting in jail just because of a $200 bail, we’ll work with them and the courts to get them out,” says Mahoney, who adds that bails can be reduced by the court commissioner if an inmate is unable to pay. “Give us one example. Nobody has done that.”
Funding for services
Opponents of the jail proposal urge officials to invest the $76 million in services that will fight the root causes of incarceration. Rodriguez says “the county could prevent hundreds of people from entering the jail in the first place if it made a serious investment — say $76 million — to end homelessness and develop community-based treatment alternatives.”
Supv. Sharon Corrigan “agrees that we need to be providing more services and more affordable housing.” But she contends the county has doubled funding for affordable housing in the last decade and is also committed to increasing funding for mental health services as well as jail diversion programs.
“I just think it’s a false choice between this jail proposal and providing these other services. The way state law is written, we can raise revenues for capital projects — like the jail — that we just can’t do for human services in the operating budget,” Corrigan says. “And we have to simultaneously fulfill our obligation to maintain a humane jail facility while pushing for more affordable housing, mental health services and other programs. We are making progress and we are driving down our rates of incarceration.”
Jailing the homeless and the mentally ill
Mahoney asked to respond to this statement by M Adams: “Jail is for punishing people. You shouldn’t be punishing people because they are homeless. You shouldn’t be punishing people with mental health issues because they have mental health issues.”
The sheriff doesn’t deny that homelessness and mental illness may be the underlying causes of why a crime is committed. But he says Adams is forgetting that a crime has still occurred.
“Homelessness is not a crime. If you are homeless and commit a crime, you will come to jail because you committed a crime. It has nothing to do with your housing situation. We also don’t lock people up for being mentally ill. They may have a mental illness. But they’ve still committed a crime. Nobody comes to jail without committing a crime,” Mahoney says. “I didn’t make the law. I didn’t make the arrest. I didn’t the file charges. [The Sheriff’s Office] doesn’t control who comes in the front door at time of arrest and we don’t control who comes in the back door at time of sentencing.”
Adams counters that black people are being disportionately punished by the criminal justice system and Mahoney is an instrument of the status quo.
“The sheriff is not the expert on black people or what black people need. He’s an expert on managing the cage so everything he says is going to support the cage,” Adams says. “What’s more important? To make white racist folks comfortable or to do the just thing and stop oppressing black people? That’s what we’re saying here.”
