Richmond City Jail. Photo credit: Scott Elmquist, Style Magazine
by James A. Bacon
The average cost for housing an inmate in Virginia’s jails and prisons runs roughly $25,000 a year. Add to that the fact that some jails are antiquated, overcrowded and need replacing. The Richmond City Jail, for instance, designed in the 1960s to hold 856 inmates, is routinely crammed with a number that fluctuates around 1,400. To address the severe overcrowding, the City of Richmond plans to open a new, state-of-the-art facility in 2014 at a cost of $134 million.
But the new hoosegow will be designed for only 1,030, not 1,400. What gives? Won’t it be almost as overcrowded the day it opens? Doesn’t it make sense to build a bigger jail?
Not necessarily. Building a bigger jail would be the easy, brain-dead thing to do. But it wouldn’t necessarily be the right thing — either for the inmates or for Richmond taxpayers.
“The opening of the new jail serves as a catalyst to do things we’ve been thinking about doing for a long time,” Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney Michael Herring told me for an article I just published in Style Weekly. “It more or less forces our hands.”
A task force headed by David Hicks, senior policy advisor to Mayor Dwight Jones, is working on a plan to reduce the city’s inmate population. Although key details still need to be hammered out, the broad outlines are clear enough:
- Mentally ill. Stop throwing the mentally ill into jail because there’s no other place to put them. It would cost taxpayers half as much money to treat them effectively in the community.
- Non-violent offenders. Petty thieves, vandals, deadbeat dads and even small-time drug dealers don’t need to spend time in jail. They should be diverted to a “day reporting center” during the day at half the cost.
- Pre-trial inmates. Re-think the city’s bond policy. Inmates awaiting trial are required to post bond and come up with 10% of the cash themselves. Most don’t have the money, and they spend a week on average taking up jail space while scraping up the money from friends and relatives. Studies show that requiring people to post bond does not make them any more likely to show up in court.
Sheriff C.T. Woody says it should be possible to reduce the jail population by half, saving millions of dollars and posing little additional safety risk to Richmonders. There are questions whether the city can achieve its ambitious goals before the new jail opens. But Herring says, “Whether we hit the target on day one is less important than the reforms we’re putting into place.”
For details, read the full article in Style.
Bacon’s bottom line: The Virginia Department of Corrections spends roughly $1 billion a year incarcerating prisoners — and that doesn’t include what local governments spend on jails. There is a lot of money to be saved from re-thinking our traditional “lock ’em up and throw away the key” approach to criminal justice. The City of Richmond is engaged in fundamentally re-thinking how it provides essential government services — exactly what Virginians need to be doing across the board for everything from transportation and land use to education and health care.
Kudos to Hicks, Herring, Woody and everyone else involved in this effort to make government both more humane and more efficient.
