Over the years, I’ve been asked to help counties plan new jails, and I always start with something else: a study of how they’re using the jails they have. Contra Costa, Jackson, Franklin, and Fulton Counties had each hired architects, construction firms, and analysts to answer one question: how many beds to build, based on assumptions about how many people they would incarcerate.
But a jail is a place: a building, its staff, its operations. Who fills that building, on the other hand, is the downstream consequence of upstream policy decisions: the ones police, prosecutors, courts, and probation make about who gets locked up, and why. A bigger building doesn’t change those decisions; it only makes room for more of them.
So before anything gets built, I insist on looking at the whole system: who is being brought into the jail, and for how long. In each of these four counties, I found, the answer to ‘how many beds?’ lay in those decisions — not in the architects’ plans.
In Contra Costa in 2015, I began my jail needs assessment by conducting a whole-system analysis. As a result of my work, instead of adding new beds, the County relocated 420 beds into a new building designed around a reentry services center.
In Jackson County, Missouri, in 2018, I found that 83 percent of the people in the main jail were awaiting trial, against two-thirds nationally, in a system whose agencies rarely worked together; the real question was why people were brought in and held, not how many cells to add.
In Franklin County, Ohio, in 2019, the new jail was already under construction. I found that people inside received 27 minutes of programming a week, and I designed the programs and oversight to make the new building and its operations serve a rehabilitative purpose.
In Fulton County, Georgia, in 2022, the jail population review I co-authored found that of the 250 cases we examined, 68 percent were held up by procedural delays and 30 percent were held because they couldn’t make bond of $15,000 or less.
Each of these represents what I call “orphan opportunities”: a moment of potential for great change, requiring only that somebody looks.