Seller shall allow Buyer to construct reasonable signage on the real property owned by Seller and described as HARMAN PARK SUB Lot: A-1 HP Sec: 15 Twn: 35 Rng: 2W for the purpose of advertising the Fred C. Harman III Law Enforcement Complex.
— from the Archuleta County Commissioners packet, January 15, 2019
This afternoon at 1:30pm, the Board of County Commissioners will consider the purchase of a 5-acre property in Harman Park for $45,000, with the apparent intention of building the Fred C. Harman III Law Enforcement Complex. The BOCC’s information packet gives no indication of how complex the Complex might be.
You can download the BOCC Addendum to the purchase contract, here. I assume the BOCC will allow the public to comment on the proposed purchase.
According to Archuleta County Sheriff Rich Valdez, speaking during the Archuleta County Republican Women’s monthly luncheon on January 8, a brand new 54-bed jail is just what our community needs. Granted that we also have other needs, of course. And granted that the proposed facility will be, in Sheriff Valdez’ words, “absolutely expensive.”
Here’s Sheriff Valdez, explaining why we need a 54-bed facility rather than, say, a 34-bed facility (like the existing jail in the County Courthouse, which was abandoned in 2015):
“So when we came up with the [planned] 54-bed facility, it wasn’t just, like, a number that we plucked out of the air. It really, truly wasn’t.
“We have the capability to house 32 to maybe 33 inmates in our current facility.
“When we talked to Bob Johnson [the architect who has been consulting with the County since 2015] and when we talked to other facilities, the average… or the best practice, I guess I should say… is you need to be able to [operate] your jail at 80 percent capacity. So what they did is, they took those 34 beds and they said, ‘Okay, how many beds would that be… to be at 80 percent?’ And that’s how they came up with 54 beds.”
I’ve often heard that government officials should not do math in public, even if they’re reciting math provided to them by a trained architect. But let’s take architect Bob Johnson at his word: that a county jail ought to operate, generally, at 80 percent occupancy.
There is no mathematical process I’m aware of, that would suggest that 34 beds is “80 percent” of 54 beds. 80 percent of 54 beds, is 43.2 beds. Call it 43.
And 80 percent of 34 beds, is 27.2 beds. Call it 27. If we had a 34-bed jail (which we do, in fact, have) we ought to be able to easily accommodate 27 inmates, on average, on an ongoing basis… according to Sheriff Valdez and architect Bob Johnson. The Archuleta County Sheriff’s detention department has not averaged 27 inmates since at least 2009 — ten years ago, under a different Sheriff, and at the very height of America’s incarceration crisis.
Below is a graph taken from a study by the Institute for Criminal Policy Research at the University of London. The study looked at the incarceration trends in ten countries: The US, Netherlands, England & Wales, Australia, Thailand, Hungary, Brazil, Kenya, India and South Africa. The graph starts with 1950 and runs through 2015.
As we see, the incarceration rate in the US (number of prisoners per 100,000 population) is more than twice that of any of the countries studied, except for Thailand. Our incarceration rate is 10 times the rate in the Netherlands, and 20 times the rate in India.
What is going on here? A few possible explanations come to mind.
1. Americans are incredibly violent, law-breaking people, compared to other people around the world. (Unlikely.)
2. American law enforcement is incredibly adept at identifying and arresting criminals. (Unlikely.)
3. Americans lock up people — and keep them locked up — for crimes for which other countries use alternative sentencing methods. (Likely.)
4. American politicians win re-election by showing that they are ‘hard on crime.’ (Likely.)
5. The US government’s ‘War on Drugs’ has resulted in millions of people being given lengthy jail sentences for ‘crimes’ that harmed no one but themselves. (Definitely true.)
Some of these possible reasons were analyzed by the University of London researchers in their 2017 report — which you can download here. Their analysis of US incarceration trends begins like this:
The trend towards what is today’s vast rate of imprisonment in the US started in the early 1970s. Over the fifty years prior to this, levels of incarceration had been fairly stable.
Thereafter, as observed by Zimring, the 35 years from 1972 “produced a growth in rates of imprisonment that has never been recorded in the history of developed nations.” By 2007, the imprisonment rate in the US had gone from being “at the high end of western democracies” but by no means an ‘outlier’… to being “three times that of any fully developed nation at any point in the post-World War II era.”
Whatever the causes of our extraordinary incarceration rates in the US, we know that, for whatever reasons, that rate began to decline in 2008 — at which point we had more than 2.3 million inmates locked up in various jails and prisons.
From the above-mentioned report:
During the election campaign last fall, we heard repeated claims coming from supporters of Ballot Measure 1A that people “who really ought to be in jail” were instead being supplied with ankle bracelets or given PR [Personal Recognizance] bonds, and perhaps sentenced to community service rather than serving a jail sentence. Those sentencing decisions are typically made by the courts, not by law enforcement.
But even a Sheriff’s deputy has considerable latitude as to whether a person is arrested, given a citation, or given a warning. Those decisions ultimately affect the number of people who must be accommodated in a local jail — or transported to a jail in Durango.
There are many good reasons for policies that keep people out of jail. Such as:
1. People who commit crimes often have families that they’re helping to support. Locking up a father or mother can put an enormous burden on the family left behind. Often, that burden eventually falls on the community as a whole.
2. People who end up with a prison record typically find it difficult or impossible to obtain employment following their release. This puts a continuing burden — even a lifetime burden — on the released inmate, their families, and eventually, on the community as a whole.
3. Some research suggests that people put in jail have higher rates of recidivism [re-committing the same kinds of crimes] than people who never spend time in jail. Community service and other types of alternative sentences can be more effective than incarceration in preventing recidivism, especially when combined with rehabilitative counseling and job training. The cost of these approaches, to the taxpayers, is a mere fraction of the cost of incarceration.
The ‘Drug Treatment Alternative to Prison’ program in New York City reported that program graduates were three-and-a half-times more likely to be employed than before they were arrested. Becoming gainfully employed is a crucial step in escaping from habitual criminal activities.
We did not hear any of these facts quoted by our County leaders at the ACRW luncheon.
Read Part Five, tomorrow…