We need your voice in solidarity! Cuyahoga County is planning to build a $400 million new jail,and we are asking community members to join the Care Not Cages Campaign by the Jail Coalition to ensure that impacted community have a strong voice in every step of this process, and that each step reflects and incorporates the value of care over that of cages. Here's the first step: send a letter!

Last Monday, the County Department of Public Works launched a webpage survey seeking public comment on the construction of the new County Jail. They have offered us to take a bubble question survey or to email them with comments about the site selection process. After reading below about community concerns for care not cages, the problems with the survey, and the problem of prisons in general, we are asking you to use the email option to express your concerns about the Steering Committee process and site selection survey.

The email is due no later than 11:59pm EST on Monday, March 22. The email should be addressed to Steve Zannoni of Project Management Consultants: steven.zanonni@aboutpmc.com (we ask that you bcc: jailcoalition@gmail.com or forward your email to us, if you feel comfortable doing so). In the space above this text you also have the option to write your own letter or edit/send one that we have crafted using our automated system.

At this point in the campaign, we are asking everyone to express their concerns with the survey and to support our campaign to get a true seat at the table for affected community members who are the true “stakeholders” on this issue.

MORE ABOUT THE CARE NOT CAGES CAMPAIGN

Phase one of our Care Not Cages campaign is to ensure that impacted community members and those who work to end the root causes of “crime” have a serious seat at the table in the Justice Center Steering Committee process. We want to ensure that restorative justice, equitable access, and care for all are the true goals of this facility. We have to demand a seat at the table so we can start the process of turning their reforms into our abolition.

The current Steering Committee is made up of direct representatives of the legal bureaucracy that puts people in jail, and as such are invested in the maintenance of the status quo. The “stakeholders” meetings are filled with representatives of the Cuyahoga county council, the Cuyahoga county court of common pleas, the ADAMHS board, private consulting companies, architect companies and other agencies whose primary interest is maintaining the business of incarceration. What the missing link is that we need to see is representation that is not invested in the justice system or the prison-industrial complex, but instead interested in the safety and wellbeing of our Cuyahoga community.

We have examined the Public Works survey that was created by consultants hired by the Justice Center Steering Committee. Reading the survey through the lens of directly impacted people, community organizers, and those working on prison reform and prison abolition, we have come to the conclusion that this survey contains loaded questions and vague phrasing that will render its results inconclusive at best, and actively counterproductive to restorative justice and community care at worst. We fear that this survey tool is less interested in generating true, meaningful community input as it is a tool to create the illusion of democratic participation in the process and a justification of a new facility.

You can find the survey here, including an hour long video about the project:

Site Survey: https://form.typeform.com/to/iAgaEyDC

Steering Committee Video: http://publicworks.cuyahogacounty.us/

If you do open the survey, you will see that the issues raised in the questions are all of great importance, but perhaps find, as we do, that ranking these important issues is not a useful way of assessing true community values. We want to make the steering committee know we don’t rate on a scale of one to five the importance of community members access to resources, opportunities, and justice. (We've identified more concerns, listed below.) We ask you to write a letter because that is a more humane way of communicating the complexity of this process, and humanity is what we strive for in each step.

What we hope for: Right now, the Care Not Cages campaign is asking for permanent representation with voting and veto power on the County Jail oversight committee and in all of the processes for the following groups of people:

1. Formerly incarcerated persons and their families

2. Professionals in the reintegration process

3. Active Ohio academics in fields of critical criminology/ social behavior/restorative justice and also experts in survey design

4. Community organizations and direct service organizations representing the base of people impacted by mass incarceration

We are also asking the Steering Committee to directly and immediately incorporate promises on the two following concerns:

1. A clear and thorough process on how this committee will support the diversion center, direct services providers, and educational platforms over the county jail

2. Continual training on best practices of confinement, fair and non punitive mechanisms for incarcerated community members (or their families) to bring up grievances at the Jail, and community oversight of jail staff misconduct

WHAT WE MEAN BY CARE, NOT CAGES

We in the Cuyahoga County Jail Coalition are prison abolitionists: we believe in care, not cages. We believe that the justice and carceral system in this country is inherently corrupt, exploitative, and white supremacist in nature and thus, un-reformable. We are interested in seeing the County invest in people through care-based alternatives to incarceration. Our dream is to see there be no need for a county prison in the very near future because everyone who has harmed themselves or another through unfortunate action be released from needless pre-trial detention and diverted into care rather than put into a cage.

Here are some of the well-established facts of why and how jails exist in the United States, and in Cleveland:

• Jails exist to warehouse people who the State does not want to take care of, or the state has decided are not worth care.

• Prisons are used to extract cheap labor.Prisoners are paid pennies per hour to do backbreaking labor that many prominent corporations rely on to keep their costs low.

•Jails are a means of coercive pre-trial intimidation that has led to the massive growth in jail populations. Jails specifically are used as a means to intimidate defendants into negotiating a plea deal. The more horrible and unpleasant a jail is, the stronger this leverage against defendants becomes and many people cave into plea deals with consequences much more severe than they would have been given in a trial setting, simply to escape the conditions of the jail.

• Jails are a means of keeping poor people poor, and extracting money from already poor people to support city budgets. Our government relies on the money accrued from fines, court fees, and bond to remain operational. the ACLU of Ohio reports that two out of three people in Ohio jails are held pretrial, meaning they are legally innocent and simply cannot afford to pay bail. From 1970–2015, the rate of Ohioans held in jails pretrial has tripled (Vera Incarceration Trends).

We recognize that a system of public safety, accountability, and justice is necessary for a healthy society. But those are not the principles on which our current system actually operates. Our leaders are not really trying to “end crime” unless they ensure that every tax dollar spent on policing and incarceration is outmatched by the funding for programs addressing poverty, mental illness, and addiction, and helping build the liberty and self-determination of all of our community members. Right now our leaders are simply trying to manage poverty and other social ills, and helping people profit it from them, without addressing the root causes that lead people to make desperate choices.

In other words, we fundamentally do not believe that there is a way to build a “good” jail.

PROBLEMS WITH THE COUNTY JAIL PROJECT

We want to hold County Government and their consultants at their word that they are sincere in their efforts to prioritize social justice and create a more humane system, as indicated by the survey. To that end, here are three points that we would like to see raised about the process, the Committee, and the planning of the new jail:

1) The Jail’s Inhumanity comes from social issues, not architectural inadequacy

The County’s approach has consistently been to look at the jail crisis as a purely material and logistical problem. They say that the jail is “over-capacity” and efforts have focused on “lowering the population.” One of the biggest points of contention for the new facility has been determining the precise number of beds "needed," as though there will be a magic number that will ensure that the human beings being caged will somehow have enough space to not suffer.

What is rarely mentioned at these Steering Committee meetings is that the most troubling realities of our County Jail have nothing to do with the building itself, but are the result of the very real, human problems perpetuated by administration mismanagement and staff misconduct, such as rampant abuse by CO’s, the existence of a sophisticated drug smuggling ring organized between CO’s and local gangs, the constant failure to provide mentally ill inmates with proper medication or support, nonstop lockdowns that a CO hiring spree failed to curb, basic idiotic mismanagement and yes, the horrible, horrible food.

We believe that these problems MUST be solved first at our current jail before there can be any public trust that they will not continue and worsen in a new facility, especially on that the city hopes will be out of prime public eye.

2) What care-centered community projects could we have instead of a $400 Million Dollars cage?

The most recent estimates place the price tag for a new jail facility at $400 million, and if previous county construction negotiations are any indicator, that’s likely to get even higher. By contrast, the County has pledged only roughly $20 million for the new diversion center, which is due to be rolled out in April 2021, only three months after the proposal was passed by County Council.

We have major concerns about the suspiciously swift rollout of the diversion center, its very limited capacity and eligibility criteria, and the fact that police will decide who has access and will be used in the facility for crisis intervention. We do admire that it could be a major step in the right direction, as at its heart it represents a push towards REAL rehabilitation and a chance for low level offenders to get help they might need to turn their life around. We just want to make sure it is equitable and non-punative.

That said, the message that the County sends with these budgeting priorities is that the people they believe can be redeemed or rehabilitated are few and far between. Crisis Intervention is only one avenue that the county could take. Cuyahoga County contains numerous municipalities, but any resident of Cleveland can attest to its crumbling infrastructure, growing number of unhoused people, deplorable public school system, the horrifically high levels of lead contamination in the water supply, and an abundance of neighborhoods that have been economically devastated by white-flight and deindustrialization. If the County were to invest $400 million towards truly addressing even one of these problems, what are the chances the crime rate might drop? What does it say to your constituents when the city is willing to invest more of our taxpayer dollars in locking us up than in addressing our numerous concerns or helping us in crisis?

3) Wherever this new jail goes, the County must invest further in that community.

We are horrified that some elected officials consider the jail to be an opportunity for development. Cuyahoga County Executive Armond Budish was rightfully called out by other members of the Justice Steering Committee for covertly meeting with real estate developers to try to negotiate building the new facility in East Cleveland. When called out, Armond Budish cited “economic development” as his motivation, which is a cruel joke to Clevelanders who deserve better. While East Cleveland has been in dire economic straits for so long that nearly any investment could help, the need for an affordable centrally located grocery store is 1000x greater, and more supportive to the community, than would be the building of a jail. Why not develop East Cleveland through care, not cages?

The truth is, the real estate in East Cleveland is "cheap" because of structural racism, in the guise of redlining, underdevelopment, and the careless conditions of extractive industries. And the residents of East Cleveland are outraged. One of the proposed jail sites is a former industrial dump that neighborhood residents already struggled for years to get cleaned up. These residents should have the site cleaned by the city because it's the humane thing to do, not as a by-product of a devil’s bargain that would clean up the site only to hold a facility that pollutes our city with state violence and neglect.

Whatever site is ultimately picked, we fear it will be in a similarly economically disadvantaged neighborhood occupied by people with little political power. Whatever neighborhood is picked, we must stand in solidarity to demand that the County sign and enforce all the provisions of a Community Benefits Agreement dictated by the needs and concerns of the people living there. If any when that fight comes, we in the Jail Coalition are prepared to do whatever we can to help that community organize. We hope you'll be there with us along each step in demanding care, not cages.

PROBLEMS WITH THE SURVEY

After seeing the flaws of the site survey, the Jail Coalition sees an immediate need for survey design experts with knowledge of critical criminal justice and prison specialities--this is one of the communities we ask the Steering Committee to add in their work to ensure soundness of research design, cultural sensitivity to avoid stigmatizing language, and fairness in question design.

The site survey contains vague and ambiguous language that makes it difficult to understand how to respond. If the questions are poorly phrased and readers cannot respond logically, then the resulting data will be worthless for decision making. One particularly troublesome example is Question #3, “How important is this statement? Please rate on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is Least Important to you and 5 is the Most Important to you: 'Creating and locating a facility that promotes access to justice.'" The logic of question is difficult to understand. Is the survey asking about creating a building or locating an existing one to be repurposed as a jail? What does "access to justice" mean? As we understand it, "justice" occurs through the court system, and those in facilities will not have any direct "access to justice" while they are incarcerated. If no one understands the questions but there are only 1 to 5 responses, then the responses are meaningless.

The survey also lacks representation for any community restorative justice approach. We see an immediate need for open-ended care-based questions in the committee's site evaluation, specifically about access to healing, education, and restorative justice. We see a need for questions around how to provide access to resources while incarcerated and upon release. There should also be open ended questions about how the facility will be accessible to those providing educational and developmental opportunities, and a need for questions about how the facility will welcome community members and organizations.

We see a need for the committee to have cultural sensitivity around the communities they are working with and for. The survey contains outdated and stigmatizing language from older "punishment" centered eras of corrections. Community members, especially those directly impacted by the system, are less likely to engage with questions that are dehumanizing and alienating towards their experiences.

Finally, we must remember that Cuyahoga County is a place full of working class and poor folks with little access to stable internet, as well as elders and others who do not routinely use the internet for public engagement. Any participatory engagement with community, including survey instruments created by the Steering Committee, should be supported by robust and equitable public engagement campaigns that reach all segments of Cuyahoga County, not just those with internet access and clear knowledge of the campaign: this include open forums, printed materials widely distributed, traditional media promotions, and a hotline for questions or concerns.