Jail Updates

There have been a number of recent special committee meetings involving jail consolidation planning and funding. I only briefly touched on the subject in the September Roundup last week. For folks wanting more information on the decisions coming up in the next couple months, here is some additional information and helpful links:

The latest "jail committee" meetings. These are special meetings of the County Board's Facilities Committee and delve more into the planning and facility needs:

• 10/6/2021 Jail Committee Video on the County's YouTube channel This meeting got into more details about potential funding scenarios with bonds up to $20 million (scenario overviews start on page 10 of the PDF file here). Brief overview from the Action Report here.
• 9/8/2021 Jail Committee Video. Action Report brief here.

The latest special Finance Committee of the Whole meetings dealing with a lot of the ARPA federal emergency relief funds available to the County:

• 9/30/2021 special Finance Committee of the Whole meeting video. The agenda packet included a list of proposed ARPA funded projects starting on page 3 (page 4 of the PDF file here). During the meeting there was discussion on what direction to give staff on the budget (though no actual votes were taken to appropriate any money at this time). Many Republican County board members advocated for using ARPA funds to ensure the jail consolidation needs were finally addressed. Democrats generally agreed with the need for jail consolidation, but disagreed on whether or how much ARPA funding should go towards paying for it.

Earlier this year the County Board had a presentation from the Sheriff on the safety issues at the downtown and satellite jail facilities. From a January cheat sheet post with links to the video and written reports:

January's Facilities Committee, which usually deals with more mundane planning and projects for the vast properties the County government owns and operates, was a good start. With a new County Board the Champaign County Sheriff had an overview of the Main and Satellite jail buildings, safety issues, and pandemic updates. The agenda packet with safety inspections on both facilities is available here. The full meeting video is available here.

The dire state of the downtown jail means it could be shut down at any time due to non-compliance and other safety issues. The current satellite jail is not currently able to meet the needs required to safely separate and house the entire population. There are both concerns of violence, medical needs and safety issues for staff and those being held in the facilities.

The funding for any consolidation plans was already controversial. There has been a long local fight about whether to invest funds into more jail facilities or local programs and services in the build up to the current crisis (a look at our Jail page that hasn't been updated in a while covers some of the earlier bases). The division is mostly along more subtle and incremental criminal justice reform ideas and those communities and organizations wanting significant action to curtail mass incarceration policies over the past couple generations. The NAACP report on local criminal justice issues is probably a good general place to start on that topic locally.

The opposition to jail funding has generally been an argument to finally address the needs of traditionally underserved communities instead of using the criminal justice system as the only tool to address the problems that emerge from their segregation and neglect. The support of the jail funding has generally been viewing those solutions as long term, while dealing with the current criminal justice system needs. Over the years both sides of the issue often feel that lack of action and support has led to the current jail and violence crises.

Using the federal emergency relief funds may technically apply to a project like jail consolidation under the funding rules. Given the impact of the pandemic to vulnerable communities, however, the use of those funds for a jail instead of the needs of those communities is untenable to some. It provides a funding option to get the jail consolidation project done for a county with almost no wiggle room in its budget already.

In spite of the County Jail being the responsibility of the County government, there was also some open talk of the cities of Champaign and Urbana possibly chipping in with their ARPA funding, given the overlap of use and need. Given the statutory separation of responsibility, however, this would likely be a non-starter with either City government according to some in that same committee conversation.

There does appear to be some signs towards a compromise of some ARPA funding and borrowing to make it happen among Democrats and Republicans on the board. It may end up being a compromise where nobody is happy, but perhaps avoids a bigger catastrophe.