For those of you who asked to hear more about Tompkins County's efforts to shift from jailing people to helping them:
About 7 years ago our county was dealing with an overcrowded jail and boarding a lot of prisoners out to other counties. When some Legislators started talking about jail expansion, I formed a committee to look at the actual research on what works in crime prevention. It ain't jails. By the time a jail study committee was formed we were ready with alternative proposals that had real scientific backing. We were able to put forth a choice between spending $1million on new programming that would reduce jail populations or spending $20million for a bigger jail. We got a million for programs that would never have been supported if we weren't able to hold up the vastly more expensive alternative.
We have three drug courts: felony, misdemeanor, and family court. We also have a community justice center, which mainly houses a day reporting center, but I have hopes that it will grow into something more comprehensive. The vision is for it to be the center for various justice programs and support services for people in trouble. We also put some money into early childhood programs, which according to the research is the most effective approach, except that the payoff in terms of jail population is 15-20 years down the road.
Bearever asked about restorative justice. That's an alternative to the current legal system that regards crimes as a violation of rules and thus an offense against the rule makers. We need to protect the rules by punishing the offender. Restorative justice takes a more holistic view; that what's wrong with crime is that damage has been done to people and to the fabric of the community. The response should be to try as best we can to restore the victim, restore the community, and restore the offender to a positive place in the community. That vision is behind the programs we've created, though we are far from actually transforming our justice system to that model. Most of our focus has been on restoring the offender.
The State Commission of Corrections (COC) gave us temporary variances that allowed us to house up to 100 people in our jail that was designed for 73. They gave similar variances to jails all over the state that were facing overcrowding. About 4 years ago the (COC) started telling counties that these variances were intended to be temporary while we worked on a permanent solution to crowding. In itself that's a reasonable position, but they have insisted that the only acceptable solution is a massive building program. In our case we proposed an expansion to 100 cells since we were having no problem living with our current 100 limit, and in fact, our population was declining, presumably due to our alternative programs. The (COC) insisted that we expand to 160 beds. The (COC) has demanded similarly oversized construction projects all over the state.
We hired a design firm and spent two years working on design options and struggling with the (COC) over size. By last fall we were in the midst of a continuing budget crisis caused largely by the state (another story that relates to the local income tax initiative) and had experienced jail populations in the sixties for most of the year. We decided that we couldn't justify or afford the expansion and dropped it from our budget. The (COC) withdrew our variances and has tried to punish us through especially strict enforcement of regulations. That enforcement prevents us from utilizing our full capacity of 73 so we've been typically boarding out 4-8 people to other counties while holding about 65 here. This is vastly less expensive than jail construction, but expensive enough to provide a good incentive to work harder on improving our other alternative and adding new ones so that our jail population continues to drop.