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Vote NO on New Jail Tax
I am writing to urge you all, fellow Greene County residents, to go to the polls on March 17th and cast your vote against Ballot Issue 12, the new jail proposal. I am writing to ask you to talk to as many Greene County residents as you can to urge them to do likewise.
While it is true that the old jail in downtown Xenia which is 50 years old and has 146 beds does need to be replaced, the new Adult Detention Center which was opened in 2000 and has 236 beds is a perfectly serviceable facility. There is no need to spend 71 million dollars of taxpayer money to abandon a building which is in good condition and will likely not be workable for another use. There is also absolutely no justification for increasing the total number of available beds from 382 to 500 and there is plenty of evidence to support the finding that if more beds are available, more will be filled. On the contrary, as a country, a state and a county, we need to be doing everything we can to decrease our use of jail time as a rehabilitation strategy.
A few figures: Currently the United States has the dubious distinction of being the world’s leader in incarceration. In the US, fully 655 people per 100,000 are incarcerated. In Russia, the number is only half that (333) and in Canada it is less than a fifth of that (114). U.S. incarceration rates have risen dramatically in the past 50 years. In 1972, there were under 200,000 people behind bars; in 2017 there were over 1,400,000 – a 700% increase! Ohio’s prison and jail incarceration rates have followed this general trend as well. These trends have been fueled by policies that have been discredited as ineffective rehabilitation strategies and it is these policies which most desperately need revision. These include mandatory sentencing guidelines for low level drug offenses and pretrial policies among others.
Let our message to our county administrators be clear: We would like to support you in upgrading the downtown jail and in developing more cost-effective, humane and outcome-effective approaches to rehabilitation. We cannot support you in increasing of bed capacity by 30% when we should be reducing our use of jails and increasing our use of alternative evidence-based practices. If the county thinks we can find $70 million for buildings perhaps we could find a similar amount for a smaller jail and the supportive services we are told are needed.
For more information on criminal justice reform, please go to The Sentencing Project; the Prison Policy Initiate and the Vera Institute of Justice. For information on the effort to defeat the Greene County proposed tax levy, please contact NoGiantJail@gmail.com.
Again, please vote no on Ballot Issue 12 on March 17th!
Kate LeVesconte
Greene County Citizens Against New Giant Jail Tax
Reasons we oppose building a 500-bed jail:
- A larger jail removes incentives for creating and improving programs for those incarcerated.
- A larger jail will lower the incentives to create programs to reduce the jail population, such as bail reform, as recommended by the Ohio Supreme Court.
- There is no plan for creating programs substance abuse or mental health disorders, only lip service.
- A larger jail will create the possibility of renting space to house federal prisoners, turning the jail into a pseudo for-profit enterprise.
- The HDR assessment contains no concrete plans for the Adult Detention Center
- The money used to manage a larger jail could be used in better, more efficient ways
- A larger jail would create added expenses to manage it, despite the claim by the Sheriff that no added manpower will be necessary.
- The proposal falls neatly into the trend of what has been termed “a rural jail boom”, the building of huge county jails in rural areas, such as the mammoth facility being built in Warren County, Ohio
- The poor will be targeted and disproportionately suffer an even higher incarceration rate than currently levels.
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Greene County Citizens Against New Giant Jail Tax
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Greene County Citizens Against Giant Jail Tax 