Pima County officials recognize their solution to the problems at the county jail could be summarized as “a committee to follow a committee to do another committee,” as County Administrator Jan Lesher quipped at the April 2 board of supervisors meeting.
But Lesher and other supervisors defended their call to charter another committee by explaining that they want more information about the jail, including who is locked up there and why — and that information has been hard to come by.
Supervisor Rex Scott, of District 1, called on county staff at the April 2 meeting “to determine which members of the jail population are flight risks or threats to public safety, and which are incarcerated for other reasons, including their inability to make bail.”
“If we don’t have that sense,” Scott said, “we’re making decisions in a vacuum.”
In February, Lesher wrote a memo recommending that the county not build a new jail. That stance came after nearly a year of analysis by a Pima County Adult Detention Center Blue Ribbon Commission, which produced a final report with a series of options to be considered by county officials.
Those options ranged from renovations to the current jail to building an entirely new jail, which the report estimated could cost as much as $858 million.
Despite not being in favor of building a new jail, Lesher recommended chartering a new commission to, among other tasks, explore how to “reduce jail populations, based on a larger review of the criminal justice system and possible procedural changes.”
But first, Lesher wants the county to do its own study.
She said any substantive assessment of current jailing practices is worthy of considerable discussion.
“Any time the county is beginning to look at the impact on — not only all of our employees there, but the public —anytime we might even consider the cost that could be hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s appropriate to have a variety of eyes and teams looking at that information,” Lesher said.
The push to take a broader look at methods of policing and incarceration in the county comes after sustained pressure from a number of local organizations, as well as concerned citizens. Groups including No Jail Deaths, the Tucson branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, and Just Communities have all been pushing local officials to take a different approach to policing and to reduce the jail population.
But not all supervisors were convinced that the county should expand the scope of its jail scrutiny. Supervisor Steve Christy, of District 4, reminded the other supervisors that it is the courts that decide who goes to jail and the Pima County Sheriff’s Department that runs the jail. Christy wanted to keep the supervisors’ focus narrowly on the actual jail facility.
“I’m very skeptical and very trepidatious about delving into areas of incarceration policies with political narratives,” Christy said.
Who’s in the jail and why?
Other supervisors are also worried about the physical state of the jail. Both Adelita Grijalva, of District 5, and Sylvia Lee, of District 3, expressed serious concerns about the condition of the jail, noting the crumbling infrastructure and the expensive repairs that have been undertaken.
Calling for more financial oversight of the sheriff’s department, Grijalva said there should be “some sort of a check and balance” to review how county finances are spent at the jail.
While Scott agreed that the facility itself needed more attention, his focus kept returning to the makeup of the jail population.
“What’s been frustrating for me,” Scott said, “is that I can’t get a clear answer from the courts as to the composition of the jail population: who’s there and why.”
Scott said he recognizes that the courts are the custodians of that information, but said that “they’re not able or perhaps not entirely willing to let us know who’s there.”
He repeatedly referenced the fact that pre-trial detainees — people charged with a crime but not convicted — should only be held in jail if they are deemed a flight risk or a threat to public safety.
And yet, at least some people remain in jail simply because they are unable to pay their bonds, which are set by the court. Scott wants an answer to: How many people are languishing in the jail because they can’t pay?
Scott said he doesn’t want the new commission “to get bogged down in trying to figure out the composition of the jail population. I’d rather that be the role of the staff team that Ms. Lesher is putting together.”
County staff have until Aug. 1, according to a March 29 memo from Jan Lesher, to complete their research.
Then they may be ready to form the next committee.
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