About 2,000 community members responded with impassioned and mixed responses to a public survey run by the Pima County Adult Detention Center Blue Ribbon Commission, which for the past year has been studying the need and feasibility of building a new county jail.
On Jan. 31, the commission released a summary of the survey results on their website, but not individual comments, which were obtained by Arizona Luminaria through a public records request. Overall, the public response varied, with people weighing in on both sides — wanting and not wanting a new jail.
While the majority of respondents said that the current jail conditions were inadequate, a plurality of respondents also didn’t want to see taxes go up to pay for a new jail.
“Fix the old jail and add new features for health care, mental health and drug detox,” one respondent wrote.
Another respondent said: “I am not in support of a new facility. Our community needs funding in other areas.”
Another wrote, “The county needs to prioritize the need to incarcerate criminals and keep citizens safe. If a new jail is needed then let’s get it done.”
“The biggest takeaway I’ve had with the survey is that 70% of those surveyed said we need to do something,” Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos wrote in a Feb. 2 email to Arizona Luminaria. “70% recognize what we have isn’t safe and isn’t working. From the start…I’ve always said, we should have the safest facility for BOTH inmate and staff.”
The online survey, live for 19 days, from the day after Christmas until Jan. 13, was the last chance for community members to offer input to the commission. Just over two weeks after the survey was closed, on Jan. 31, the commission delivered their final report, over 300 pages long, to Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher.
“Build tents for the inmates, our military soldiers have to stay in tents so why not inmates too,” one survey respondent offered.
Another wrote, “I worked at the jail from 1987 to 2011, I saw how overcrowded the jail has become and how it has been falling apart. The jail has been understaffed for years.”
Someone against a new jail wrote, “What about our crumbling infrastructure elsewhere? Our bare bones public transit? Underfunded health department? Increasingly growing homelessness problem? That money and land could be used for low income or emergency housing, to improving our bus lines, to creating a community where people don’t HAVE to turn to crime. Please do NOT go through with this!”
The comments come in response to increased scrutiny of the jail in the past years. At least eight people died in the Pima County jail in 2023. At least 10 more people died within 30 days of being released from the jail last year. People held in the jail and former employees have consistently decried poor and delayed medical care. The county pays Alabama-based, for-profit medical provider, NaphCare, about $1.2 million per month for medical care in the jail.
Both county and sheriff department officials, as well as a critical public, have acknowledged the rising challenges to locking up people who are suffering from mental health and addiction disorders. In-custody deaths and reports of abuses have soared in jails throughout the country. Proffered and attempted solutions have varied from decriminalizing certain drugs in order to lower jail populations, cracking down on homelessness and substance abuse, as well as building new and larger jail facilities.
The latter is the proposed strategy of Sheriff Nanos, who asked the board of supervisors to fund a new jail via a sales tax in December of 2022. Citing the crumbling building and poor design, in an appearance before the supervisors that same month, Nanos said of the jail, “Its current condition is not just unlivable for our inmates, but for me, it’s a disgusting place to work. It’s a horrific work environment.”
The next month, Pima County Administrator Jan Lesher called for the formation of a commission to study building a new jail in a Jan 11, 2023 memo. The commission began meeting in March of 2023.
The commission held seven meetings, all open to the public, though the first three meetings were sparsely attended except for commission members and county officials. One of the meetings in August was adjourned within minutes after community members, expressing their opposition to a new jail, entered the meeting playing music.
After almost a year of work, the commission released the full report on Monday, Feb. 5 to the media but embargoed it until Feb. 6 when Lesher will officially deliver it to the board of supervisors.
According to an initial findings report the commission released to the public in December, estimated renovations could cost $623 million and an entirely new jail could cost up to $858 million.
Survey results
An overwhelming majority of respondents to the survey reported that they had been living in Pima County more than 10 years and 86% of respondents identified as White, with about 23% of respondents identifying as Latino. The population of people detained in the jail is 44% Latino and 16% Black, according to statistics from 2022. Only 3% of survey respondents identified as Black.
About 65% of respondents either work at the jail, formerly worked at the jail or work in law enforcement. Just under 30% of respondents had family members who had been detained in the jail for at least one day.
More than 53% of respondents said they learned about jail conditions from the local media. More than 21% said they learned about jail conditions either because they work at the jail, have been incarcerated there or frequently visit the jail — three significantly different perspectives of the jail combined into a single response.
The survey did not include a yes/no question as to whether the county should build a new jail. Instead the central question was framed: “If the Board of Supervisors decides improved adult detention facilities are needed, which of the following do you support the most?”
Respondents were given eight options to choose from: construction of a new jail; renovation of the existing jail; combination of new construction and renovation; “right-sizing the facility to meet forecasted population”; improvements to medical, mental health, and detox facilities; modernization of the current facility to improve living standards and offer more services and programs; support depends on cost; and none of the above, “I do not support new construction or improvements.”
A narrow plurality, 18.8% of respondents, supported the construction of a new facility. 18.02%, meanwhile, said that they “do not support any new construction or improvements to the current facility.”
Limited options
Wanda Bertram, a spokesperson with the Prison Policy Initiative, a non-partisan organization that studies prisons and jails, said the framing of the questions in the commission’s survey “sort of sets people up to think a new jail is necessary.”
Mia Burcham, an organizer with No Jail Deaths, a Tucson-based organization founded by people who have had family members die in the jail, had a similar response: “The survey is composed of entirely leading questions meant to make respondents believe that their only options are jail expansion or an entirely new jail,” Burcham said.
“We know that jail isn’t the answer to any of the issues the survey points to,” Burcham continued, “and that, by the county commissioner’s own admission in a recent assessment of the jail healthcare provider, care can’t be provided adequately in a jail setting.”
A survey implies that the respondents’ feedback will be listened to. But, according to Bertram, recent experience in watching other counties in different parts of the country build new jails tells her that’s not necessarily what will happen. “Design firms are going to apply for the contract and they’ll provide pre-made blueprints as options,” Bertram said.
It will likely come down to simple questions of cost, she said.
Bertram suggested that problems associated with the jail could be better solved through investing in more community services such as community health care, expansions of affordable housing, improvements to education, after school programs and summer programs for children, services for domestic abuse survivors.
“It’s telling that Pima County brought together this commission instead of studying social issues in the community,” Bertram said. “Far too many counties will look at an overcrowded or crumbling jail and think the answer is a new facility.”
Arizona Luminaria reached out to Pima County Board of Supervisors Chair Adelita Grijalva to ask her impression of the survey and the Blue Ribbon Commission’s final report. On Friday, Feb 2, she wrote via email that she hadn’t had a chance to read through all of the survey responses or the final report, which she had just received.
Grijalva did mention, however, that she appreciated a statement included in the executive summary of the final report, which reads, “While the Commission’s scope was limited to evaluating the condition of the jail itself, it became immediately apparent to the Commission that doing so in isolation without consideration of the coexisting societal problems surrounding confinement may not completely resolve the issue and will need to be addressed in a more global fashion through future community wide efforts.”
“I believe this is a step forward in having a larger community-wide discussion, with our non-profit partners, advocacy groups, and cities and municipalities to create a comprehensive plan to address the prevention, intervention and diversion services to reduce the jail population.”
Prohibitive cost?
Despite the plurality of respondents saying they supported a new jail, over 42% of respondents also said they do not support any new taxes to pay for the jail.
Sheriff Nanos, responding to Arizona Luminaria via email, wrote on Feb. 2, “The cost is still something I believe can come down…it just depends on what it is we build.” He referenced that his vision of the jail, which would include more open living spaces instead of one or two-person cells, would help defer costs.
“A design team would need to look at what exists today before any commitment is made as to what is built,” Nanos wrote.
But Burcham and others questioned if the current dysfunction of the jail means a new and bigger facility is the answer.
“The commission can try to manufacture consent for their proposal out of a couple thousand survey responses and some leading questions,” Burcham said, “but it’s going to be a lot harder to replicate that support for this disastrous project in practice.”
With mixed responses to the survey, and with the final report from the commission in hand, it is now up to the county supervisors to decide next steps. The board is scheduled to discuss the commission’s final report at their Feb. 20 meeting.
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