News: Too Many Behind Bars?

With less than two weeks until Hamilton County voters go to the polls to decide on a controversial sales tax increase to build a new jail, the rhetoric on both sides of the issue is heating up.

Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune, a Democrat who supports the tax increase, squared off Oct. 17 with County Commissioner Pat DeWine, a Republican opposed to the plan, at a televised debate at WCET (Channel 48) studios. With only an hour to answer questions, the pair barely skimmed the complicated issues involving the county’s criminal justice system that are at dispute.

In fact, how the debate was set up spotlighted one of the basic points of contention.

The event’s organizers rejected a request to include a speaker from the No Jail Tax political action committee, one of the key groups opposing construction of a new jail. As the No Jail Tax PAC pointed out, DeWine only opposes the current tax proposal but supports building a new jail, while the PAC and other organizations such as the local NAACP question the need for a new facility at all.

If approved by voters, Issue 27 would increase Hamilton County’s sales tax by a half-cent, from 6.5 percent to 7 percent, for eight years; then it would be scaled back to a quarter-cent increase, to 6.75 percent, for seven years. After 15 years the sales tax increase would expire; it would generate $736 million during that period.

The cash would be used to build a $198 million, 1,800-bed adult jail in Camp Washington and overhaul the county’s criminal justice system by generating more than $20 million annually to create an endowment to operate the jail and fund substance abuse treatment, counseling and probation programs for offenders.

“Jail space without the treatment is not going to work,” Portune says.

“If we can’t lower the recidivism rate, we’re never going to put a dent in crime.”

DeWine, however, says the current plan is flawed. It would provide funding for treatment programs that haven’t yet been identified. Also, there is nothing preventing future county commissions from diverting the tax revenues to pay for other types of programs, making the plan unaccountable to voters.

“The question is, what’s really going to be different if this passes,” DeWine says. “The answer is no one can really tell you. … To date, there’s been nothing published, nothing at all, about what programs would be funded.”

Needless incarceration?
Meanwhile, groups opposed to building a new jail altogether point to a 2006 study by criminal justice experts hired by Hamilton County. The study questioned the efficiency of the county’s criminal justice system and whether some of the jail-overcrowding crisis was due to red tape and poor policy decisions.

The study, conducted by the New York-based Vera Institute of Justice, concluded Hamilton County already has a higher rate of incarceration than any other urban Ohio county and examined whether some of the people there need to be locked up at all.

Among its conclusions, the study found that the typical population in Hamilton County’s jail space has changed dramatically in recent years. In 2006, 81 percent of inmates in the county’s facilities were there awaiting trial, up from just 37 percent in 1999. Also, expedited mechanisms of release — such as bonds and “forthwith discharges” — are being used less frequently.

More disturbingly, people who have criminal charges against them ultimately dismissed spend twice as many days in jail as those who are ultimately found guilty.

Vera recommended establishing a community-based continuum of punishments and making increased use of alternative punishments that do not require the use of valuable jail space. Further, the study recommended improved access to special courts — domestic violence court, mental health court and drug court — that are designed to impose the types of punishment and treatment that would best reduce recidivism.

The study concluded that, if Hamilton County doesn’t fix those types of process problems, its jail overcrowding problem will continue regardless of how much new jail space is built.

Among other concerns with Issue 27, DeWine believes it includes inflated costs that aren’t in sync with what other area counties have paid for similar facilities.

If approved, the ballot measure means Hamilton County would spend about $110,000 per new bed. That compares to Butler County, which built a brand new, state of the art jail facility in 2002 for only $47,619 per bed. This was not simply an expansion to an existing facility — as the tax proponents have stated — but an entirely new, separate facility, DeWine notes.

Additionally, Kenton County is projecting the cost of its new jail facility to be about $66,600 per bed. Like Hamilton County’s proposal, Kenton’s also is an entirely new facility, not an expansion. Other jurisdictions have expanded existing facilities at a much cheaper cost. They include Campbell County in 2005, which cost $27,343 per bed; Clermont County in 2006, at $50,925 per bed; and Warren County in 2004, at $27,777 per bed.

County Commissioner David Pepper, a Democrat who supports Issue 27, says DeWine’s comparisons are misleading. It costs more to build in an urban environment than in a rural one. Also, inflation makes construction costs increase each year. Pepper noted that DeWine and the Coalition Opposed to Additional Spending and Taxes supported a different plan last year that would have built a more expensive jail, a plan that was rejected by voters last November.

“The cost of delay is what’s killing us,” Pepper says. “It will never get any cheaper to solve this problem.”

Lots o’ cells
One complaint about Issue 27 — that it would mostly affect low-income African-American residents or, as some opponents have said, “lock up more black people” — isn’t entirely accurate, according to the Vera report.

Although African-Americans in Hamilton County account for more than 63 percent of the jail population, compared to 23 percent of the total county population, the study showed Hamilton County had the least disparity between African-Americans and whites for the eight urban counties examined. In fact, the other jurisdictions show much higher differences in their jail populations. The number of African-American inmates was the highest in Cuyahoga County, including Cleveland.

The counties examined were Cuyahoga, Franklin, Hamilton, Lucas and Summit in Ohio; Marion County in Indiana, which includes Indianapolis; Kent County in Michigan, which includes Grand Rapids; and Allegheny County in Pennsylvania, which includes Pittsburgh.

So, compared to those other counties, how does Hamilton County’s existing jail space rank? The answer is: We have plenty of jail beds and we’re not afraid to fill them.

Hamilton County is in the mid-range for population levels but has the second highest number of jail beds per capita — 2.9 beds per 1,000 people. It also has the second highest rate of incarceration — 236 people per every 100,000 residents.

Only Marion County, Ind., whose major city population (Indianapolis) is more than twice that of Cincinnati, has a higher rate of incarceration. Columbus, a city with twice the population of Cincinnati, has a fractionally lower rate of incarceration; Cuyahoga County, whose major city (Cleveland) is larger than Cincinnati, has a substantially lower rate of incarceration. ©

This article appears in Oct 24-30, 2007.