Hard Timing

One of the more troubling results from Election Day back in November came out of Kootenai County, where law enforcement’s second crack at expanding the Kootenai County Jail was rejected so thoroughly that neither of the two measures required even hit 40 percent approval. Only a few years earlier, a similar plan hit 63 percent support — just three points shy of the 66 percent supermajority required for passage. The conventional wisdom is that this was not the time to ask for public money, and Kootenai County was asking for a lot — $145 million for a jail expansion and other new badly needed facilities.

Ironically, the downturn in the economy, experts have found through past recessions, will overburden the jail even more. And it’s already bad, as Kootenai County residents continue to pay to transport those being held on criminal charges to jails in Montana and Republic, Wash.

It’s a sobering story for Spokane County, where a similar jail expansion is under consideration. And county officials already seem to be getting the message, as there will likely be no vote on the $250 million plan in 2009. But it will happen, as inmates sleeping in halls and jail officers working in unsafe conditions cannot be allowed to go on for much longer.

Over the past several decades, local law enforcement agencies all over the nation have found themselves as first-responders to all variety of social ills. And it’s no different here, as our men and women behind the badges deal with drug addicts, wife and children abusers, alcoholics and the mentally ill, along with the usual assortment of drug dealers, drunk drivers and petty thieves. Thirty years ago, if they arrested a mentally ill person, they could drop him or her off at the mental hospital; today, they book ’em, making the Spokane County Jail the third largest mental health institution in the state.

More and more, cops have become the social workers we’ve cut out of less popular government programs.

And law enforcement has been slow to adapt to all its new responsibilities, but in recent years great strides have been made, including here in Spokane and Kootenai counties, where a wide variety of interventions are offered, from drug court to mental health court, and from anger management classes to job training programs. It’s a big, complicated and often ugly picture and now is the time for the entire community to better understand it so that we can create the most efficient and humane system we can that also guarantees public safety.

As Spokane County plans its next move, officials will work to fine tune as many of the supporting programs as they can. One such program is to offer pretrial services 24 hours a day. Defendants can be processed and assessed for risk at any time so that fewer jail stays are required. And funding is continuing for the drug and the mental health courts, although even that has been cast in some doubt by recent developments.

The other huge issue that needs to be better understood is the public cost of the jail’s population, especially medical costs, which can burst unexpectedly onto the taxpayers’ bottom line. It’s not a very well kept secret that if you are arrested, your medical bills become the public’s expense. This can manifest itself in many ways, from three very sick individuals costing the county $600,000 a few years ago to two homeless people robbing a bank just to get help.

One of the lessons the public needs to learn is that by ignoring the problem or rejecting any expenditure aimed at the criminal justice system, the problems — and expense — don’t go away. We all still pay, and sometimes much, much more.

Times are tough and may well get tougher. When people lose their homes or their jobs, more wind up coming in contact with local law enforcement. More wind up in jail. Jails start to burst at the seams.

Now is the time to thoroughly investigate the situation, as Spokane County seems to be doing. Still, even more can be done. A lot of what is going on has to do with mandatory sentencing and other legislation once sold as easy fixes or get-tough-on-crime efforts. That fine print can cost a lot of money, so there may be legislative changes needed. But we often don’t even know the contours of the problem: For example, when we wrote about medical marijuana in last week’s cover story, we couldn’t even get a figure for what percentages of the local jail and state prison populations are made up of non-violent pot-smokers. Are we filling our them with people who shouldn’t really be in there? We just don’t know.

Then there’s the question of cost. Building a tower of a jail on Spokane County land along North Monroe, shadowing both the new YMCA complex and the Kendall Yards project, seems to be a bad idea and is destined to be a political struggle. Spokane County arrived at that proposal through a valid process, but the writing may be on the wall that now it’s time to look for a smarter and cheaper Plan B. And one big Plan B could start by observing the obvious: Spokane and Kootenai counties face exactly the same problem at exactly the same time. Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich and Kootenai County Sheriff Rocky Watson should get together to consider whether an inter-municipal, jointly operated jail might just save us all some money.

By cooperating regionally and by starting an honest discussion about the challenges we face together, our leaders will have a better chance of selling a solution to a set of problems that are not going away any time soon.