A how-to guide: Critically reviewing a jail assessment calling for a bigger jail

by Naila Awan

Counties across the country are regularly discussing or advancing plans to expand existing jails or build new facilities to increase their capacity to incarcerate more people. Jail assessments (sometimes referred to as “justice system assessments,” “needs assessments,” “master plans,” or “feasibility studies”) have become a core part of these discussions and decisions. Jail assessments are analyses, often conducted by private companies who have been hired by a county, to analyze the operations of the current jail and make recommendations for building a new jail or expanding an existing one. The assessments can be dense: hundreds of pages in length with graphs, discussions of statistical models, and the use of multiple terms of art. But community members should not be deterred from reading these documents with a critical eye: these reports often have obvious flaws or even provide data that supports arguments against building a bigger jail.

The Prison Policy Initiative has supported multiple groups organizing against county efforts to create more jail space, often reviewing and providing feedback on the county’s jail assessment. We added a new guide to our Advocacy Toolkit to help local advocates and decision-makers identify some of the questions that can be helpful to consider when reviewing a jail assessment. The full version of this guide is on our website. In it, we:

• Explain how to identify flawed assumptions that are baked into these assessments that skew their results.
• Show how to know whether the voices of community members, incarcerated people, and community advocates were included in the information-gathering process, and tips for getting your voice heard.
• Help you spot when consultants cherry-pick data in charts and tables to support their pre-determined outcomes.
• Explain how, in many communities, reducing the number of people jailed for misdemeanors is likely a more effective option than new jail construction.
• Show how to identify services that would be better provided in the community.
• Provide a glossary of terms often used in these assessments.

Below is an excerpt from the guide. You can find the full guide on our website.

What assumptions did the authors make?

Jail assessments commonly assume that the local criminal legal system is operating at peak efficiency and include presumptions that skew numbers upwards, in support of ever-larger jails. For example, assessments often explicitly state that it is assumed there will be no change to the status quo, even when reforms that could reduce incarceration are being seriously considered at the local or state level or have already passed:

Montgomery County, Ohio Jail Assessment (Dec. 2021).

Benton County, Oregon Jail Assessment (Jan. 2019).

No analysis is provided of the impact proposed reforms will have on incarceration rates. What is even more troubling is that these assessments sometimes fail to take into account or even discuss the impact reforms that have already passed will have on incarceration numbers. We saw this in Otsego County, Michigan, as discussed in our publication Smoke and mirrors: A cautionary tale for counties considering a big, costly new jail.

In Otsego County, the jail assessment discussed how “over 1,100 outstanding warrants” and the rise in drug cases contributed to the need for a bigger jail. However, the assessment failed to acknowledge that:

• many of the warrants were for underlying offenses that, based on recent changes in Michigan law, were no longer criminal or jailable, and thus unlikely to lead to actual jail time; and
• the drug cases referenced were brought before Michigan legalized recreational marijuana use, possession, and licensed sale, and a significant number of the cases referenced involved marijuana.

Our analysis of Otsego County’s backlog of warrants.

In addition, jail assessments occasionally discuss the need for rolling back reforms that have reduced incarceration rates. This may be the case when the county has been more successful at adopting reforms — such as cite and release — than its neighboring counties, as was the case in Benton County, Oregon. In Benton County, law enforcement argued that citation and release should be used in 18-23 percent fewer cases, ostensibly only because this successful strategy is used less in other places:

Benton County, Oregon jail assessment (Jan. 2019).

It is important to note that “[f]inalizing jail bed need forecasts is more a matter of policy than of statistics.” This fact, recognized in a 2019 Cortland County, New York assessment, also underscores the need for jail assessments to consider “alternative policies, programs, and practices” that could reduce incarceration. The impact of policy decisions on jail planning is also reflected in the “systems approach” recommended by the U.S. Department of Justice’s National Institute of Corrections. A “systems approach” looks at how the different parts of the criminal legal system impact jail populations, instead of focusing on those populations alone. This approach considers laws that determine what offenses are “jailable” as well as decisions made by various actors in the criminal legal system — law enforcement, prosecutors, judges, magistrates, court systems, and jail administrators — that impact pretrial release, charging, processing, and sentencing. After all, each of these elements has a direct bearing on how many people are incarcerated.

When looking at the presumptions authors have made in a jail assessment, be sure to ask:

• Does the assessment assume no changes in law or policy will be made in the next several decades that could reduce the jail population?
• Have laws or policies been changed that will affect the jail population, but which the assessment is not discussing or accounting for?
• Are changes in laws or policies being advanced that would reduce incarceration rates, but which are not being accounted for?
• Is the assessment advocating for more beds based on the presumption that certain policies or practices that have reduced incarceration numbers should be scaled back or reversed? What supporting evidence or details do they offer? Are these valid?
• Is the assessment examining actions criminal legal system actors (i.e., law enforcement, judges, prosecutors, jail administrators) can take to reduce incarceration rates?

***

This is an excerpt from our new guide to help advocates oppose proposals to build or expand jails in their communities. You can find the full guide on our website.