Smile Politely is a local on-line magazine that has local writers about a variety of topics of local life from entertainment to dining to politics. They had a jail article that elicited a response from a County Board member in the comments, so if county board members are reading it, I suppose we should too. Here's an excerpt from the full op/ed piece:
The jail plan that won’t die
A multimillion-dollar bond that would provide county public safety sales tax revenue to upgrade the county’s satellite jail, including facilities for mental and medical health care, has not appeared in Champaign County Administrator Rick Snider’s budget proposal, and it’s fair to say that vocal grassroots pushback has quite a bit to do with that. The Department of Justice grant that funded Deputy Sheriff Allen Jones’s Crisis Response Planning Committee, supposedly formed to divert arrestees in need of mental health or substance abuse services from the jail, but now working to provide in-jail facilities, has not been renewed. Jones himself was cited in the News-Gazette on October 13th saying that the jail was the wrong place to deliver mental and medical health services.
But seemingly unbeknownst to many on the County Board and in the local media, the jail plan lives on. The figure of $261,113 — over a quarter of a million dollars — is in the current proposal to be allocated either for planning the building of new cells at the satellite jail or for construction at the downtown jail to bring it into compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act in fulfillment of a years-old Department of Justice citation. It’s not clear how this determination would be made, but past statements have made it clear that the sheriff’s department very much wants to demolish the decaying downtown jail and upgrade the satellite jail. In an August meeting of the county board facilities committee, Sheriff Walsh and Captain Vogees, who runs the jail, spoke of the need for 50 to 60 beds in double-bunked cells, plus a new item: 24 one-person cells dedicated to “special management housing.” The stated intention behind these cells is to provide specialized care inside the jail, though of course this takes funding away from a possible community-based behavioral health provider, and it’s also not clear how qualified round-the-clock staffing would be paid for. In addition, if built, these cells would likely be used for punitive solitary confinement; this is almost always the purpose served by a “special management unit” in a prison or jail...
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