Dear City Council Members and Eau Claire press,

I would like to bring your attention to a report released at the very end of February by the US Department of Justice entitled  Eau Claire County Local Justice System Assessment   ( US Department of Justice, National Institute of Corrections, Jail Division, NIC TA-08J1010).  According to the report, it was commissioned by the Eau Claire County Board of Supervisors and the Eau Claire County Criminal Justice Collaborating Council.  You can read the entire report before many members of the County Board by going to http://tyronecoal.com/NIC2008.pdf   (Appendix at http://tyronecoal.com/NICAppendix2008.pdf ).  For anybody interested in Eau Claire's jail issue, the report is informative, engaging and easy to read.  It also appears damning.

In current discussions regarding the jail, the generally accepted premise has been that the need for increased capacity is obvious.  But, according to the report, this is hardly clear. Further, in highlighting the paucity of information on the jail and the jailed, the report explains that plenty of data is available but little has been done with it.  This, in turn, explains the public's lack of knowledge, and thus participation, in the entire jail expansion debate.  The report clearly suggests that the county has too little information for it to know what it needs in terms of a new and expanded jail facility.  In fact, an overall tenor of the report is that Eau Claire is jailing more people than the state or any of the other counties in their comparative analyses.

According to the report, the authors/consultants were in town on 19 th -21 st of February 2008 to conduct assessments of jail capacity and occupancy (page 14), the very day that the County Board of Supervisors voted to pass the first $25 million bond toward the jail.  It is inconceivable to me how the county can confidently state that $59.1 million will fix the problem when, as the report demonstrates, it is clear that they do not even understand the problem.  Unless I am missing something fundamental, it is nothing short of unbelievable that the county ramrods the jail through before examining the report and openly debating its recommendations.  The findings, the questions the report raises, and the recommendations are numerous, extensive and hardly trivial.  They include encouraging public involvement in defining the purpose of the jail, tapping into expertise at UW-Eau Claire (Political Science, Criminal Justice and those with information skills), and exploring the various alternatives to incarceration.

Because the county knew that this report was still underway but very near completion at the time of the 20 February Board meeting (a board meeting with up to a hundred anguished citizens in attendance), it will be very difficult to convince our community that the county was trying to be anything other than deceptive.  If I were a County Board of Supervisors member, I would be livid to have had this information withheld, voting to spend millions of dollars on a cart before knowing anything about the horse.

Below, I have pasted a few excerpts from my quick reading.  These are not intended to take statements out of context, but to provide evidence that jail inadequacy, the apparent driver for the current expansion, is not how discussions should proceed.   In fact, the more I consider the report, the more it seems that specific plans for a jail and its expansion are premature.  Thus, any talk of WHERE to put the jail is inappropriate when we do not know its purpose. Until the system wide and policy problems are understood and addressed, building a new jail will – as some county supervisors even expressed concern over on 20 February – bring us back to where we are now

We expect, and hope for, a row when the public learns of this report, its findings and recommendations.