Dear City Council Members and Eau Claire press

Dear City Council Members and Eau Claire press,

I would like to bring your attention to a report released at the very end of February by the US Department of Justice entitled Eau Claire County Local Justice System Assessment (US Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections, Jail Division, NIC TA-08J1010). According to the report, it was commissioned by the Eau Claire County Board of Supervisors and the Eau Claire County Criminal Justice Collaborating Council. You can read the entire report before many members of the County Board, including an appendix. For anybody interested in Eau Claire's jail issue, the report is informative, engaging and easy to read. It also appears damning.

In current discussions regarding the jail, the generally accepted premise has been that the need for increased capacity is obvious. But, according to the report, this is hardly clear. Further, in highlighting the paucity of information on the jail and the jailed, the report explains that plenty of data is available but little has been done with it. This, in turn, explains the public's lack of knowledge, and thus participation, in the entire jail expansion debate. The report clearly suggests that the county has too little information for it to know what it needs in terms of a new and expanded jail facility. In fact, an overall tenor of the report is that Eau Claire is jailing more people than the state or any of the other counties in their comparative analyses.

According to the report, the authors/consultants were in town on 19th-21st of February 2008 to conduct assessments of jail capacity and occupancy (page 14), the very day that the County Board of Supervisors voted to pass the first $25 million bond toward the jail. It is inconceivable to me how the county can confidently state that $59.1 million will fix the problem when, as the report demonstrates, it is clear that they do not even understand the problem. Unless I am missing something fundamental, it is nothing short of unbelievable that the county ramrods the jail through before examining the report and openly debating its recommendations. The findings, the questions the report raises, and the recommendations are numerous, extensive and hardly trivial. They include encouraging public involvement in defining the purpose of the jail, tapping into expertise at UW-Eau Claire (Political Science, Criminal Justice and those with information skills), and exploring the various alternatives to incarceration.

Because the county knew that this report was still underway but very near completion at the time of the 20 February Board meeting (a board meeting with up to a hundred anguished citizens in attendance), it will be very difficult to convince our community that the county was trying to be anything other than deceptive. If I were a County Board of Supervisors member, I would be livid to have had this information withheld, voting to spend millions of dollars on a cart before knowing anything about the horse.

Below, I have pasted a few excerpts from my quick reading. These are not intended to take statements out of context, but to provide evidence that jail inadequacy, the apparent driver for the current expansion, is not how discussions should proceed. In fact, the more I consider the report, the more it seems that specific plans for a jail and its expansion are premature. Thus, any talk of WHERE to put the jail is inappropriate when we do not know its purpose. Until the system wide and policy problems are understood and addressed, building a new jail will – as some county supervisors even expressed concern over on 20 February – bring us back to where we are now.

We expect, and hope for, a row when the public learns of this report, its findings and recommendations.

Sincerely,
Paul Kaldjian Dan Drumm

Excerpts 1) "Eau Claire is safe and its people are pretty well behaved (page 18)."

2) "The jail is used to house a wide range of inmate types. It is attempting to do too much. Almost anyone can be admitted. A very wide variety of federal, immigration, out of state, state, and local inmates reside there. It is a mixture of three distinct groups: "people we are afraid of, people we are upset with and people we do not know what to do with (page 19)."

3) "More clearly defining the purpose of the jail is a first step in managing the flow into the jail and the length of stay. This will help define the number and composition of the jail population. Until and unless this is done, the jail will remain crowded (page 19)."

4) "The predominant view, the predominant strategy for coping with the growing workload has been to seek additional resources, add jail beds, and add program capacity. This represents a near singular strategy aimed at trying to outrun growth by adding capacity. But the system is up against substantial resource limits and the strategy is coming under increased scrutiny because, to some, it does not seem to be working (page 20)."

5) "A first conceptual trap has been the view that jail crowding is "the problem." A related notion is the view that jail crowding is "the Sheriff's problem". It turns out that jail crowding really just a symptom. It is a symptom of problems within the larger justice system. Success requires a system-wide approach. One must literally go outside the perceived "problem" in order to solve it (page 20/21)"

6) "Some of the people who were interviewed seem to believe that a new jail will "solve the problem". In fact, a new jail, by itself, may not change very much. New bed space may be filled quickly. It is also possible that the new emerging programs will expand the total number of people under correctional supervision, also fill to capacity, and have very little impact on the number of people in jail (page 24)."

7) "Recommendations include increased public participation and better analysis of existing data to provide information on the jail population, its characteristics and needs, put into a proper form, analyzed and routinely reported out. . . . Understanding these population dynamics is essential to understanding why the number of people in jail is increasing (or falling) (page 29)."

8) "Between 2002 and 2006, the Number of Index Crimes Reported to law enforcement in Eau Claire County decreased -14%. . . . . When these numbers are adjusted to account for increases in the countywide population during this period, the decreases are even larger (page 11)."

9) "Adult arrests in Eau Claire County increased by 24% during this period. This is in sharp contrast to the declining Index crime rates in the County, and in contrast to the statewide adult arrest trends (page 12)."

10) "The Eau Claire County crime prone age group (age 15-24) can be expected to peak in 2010, then decline substantially by the year 2020. This age cohort is expected to grow at about one half the rate of the general county population through 2030 (page 12)."

11) " The basic message: These trends do not support the view that the general County population has become more criminogenic. Instead, the increase in the demand for criminal justice services appears to stem from changes in the response of the criminal justice system. In conjunction with the other analyses that have been prepared, it appears that a larger number of people have been placed under correctional supervision, under more stringent behavioral requirements, and for longer periods of time (page 12/13)."

12) "Utilization of the Jail bed space resource is not well understood by justice system officials, general officials of county and city governments, or the public. The jail data was not organized to permit analysis. It was difficult to determine how the jail space is being used. The classification system is a mystery. Bookings and length of stay of the various inmate types are not being analyzed. The prior studies that have been done have been uniformly weak in detailing and describing the various subtypes of inmates in jail and how much space they occupy (page 19)"