Dane County’s jail money pit gets deeper, but some want to keep digging

The project now tops $200 million, but some are giving in to sunk-cost thinking.

Only one bid came in for the Dane County Jail project, and it was way over its estimated cost. So the Dane County Board is looking to ram through $27.6 million more in spending on top of the $166 million the county has borrowed in total for the project so far, in order to accept that one bid before it expires. 

We’re back at the trough, baby! 

The County Board will take up both this borrowing and the airport Joint Use Agreement at its January 18 board meeting.

The discourse will continue to make it sound like we have no choice. “Time to get shovels in the ground!” people are saying, still stoked to start the largest Dane County public works project ever, to build a big cube of cages. But that noise is all from people listening to Sheriff Kalvin Barrett. And every sheriff always wants a shiny new jail.

If we do keep barreling down this spending-filled borehole, how many times in the next few years will we suddenly have to spend millions more dollars on a failed system that only reinforces Dane County’s longstanding racial biases? And what are our other options? 

Impacts from carceral spending

Patrick Miles (current County Board chair) explained at a Personnel & Finance Committee meeting on January 8 why he had introduced the resolution authorizing yet more funding for the jail project. “I decided we need to close the gap on this investment,” he said. This makes it clear that our leaders see this tower of cages as an “investment” in supposed safety. There’s little evidence that jailing people pretrial makes us safer, and scholars often call our epidemic of mass incarceration in the US a “public health problem“.

During the meeting, Miles went on: “We’ve made considerable investments in the project, getting certain things in place and whatnot. So millions have already been spent.” This “whatnot” is the sunk cost fallacy in action. Yes, it feels bad that we’ve spent $14 million on consultants to plan this nonsense. But that’s not actually a good reason to sink even more money into something that’s not going to make us safer.

Fiscal impacts were not included in the fiscal estimate on the borrowing resolution, because “too many things are up in the air,” as Dane County Chief Financial Officer Chuck Hicklin said at that January 8 meeting.  The fiscal estimate simply reads: “The total project cost exceeds $200 million. The project will be financed with general obligation debt issued in future years.” From this public information on Legistar, it’s unclear what us taxpayers will end up paying out of our pockets via county taxes, or what the debt service will look like in total for this jail project if we spend $200 million plus interest on it.

Miles finished by saying: “We have an obligation to get this project done, especially to close the top two floors of this building, to provide a safe place for the residents of this building, as well as the staff. Doing this does not impact our efforts around justice reform, or our efforts to address the underlying causes of why people engage with the justice system.”

We’ll revisit the fact that there are almost certainly cheaper paths to closing the jail facilities on the top two floors of the City County Building (CCB) that have been possible for the last decade. But it is important to point out how patently false it is that spending all this money on a jail does not impact reform. Money spent on a jail can’t be spent on other programs and methods to stop the inequality that leads to desperation, which eventually escalates to the harms we label “crime” and the arrestable events that follow.

Other options to move forward

Clearly, the shovels-in-the-ground caucus are not going to be convinced. They want to build this thing at any cost. But for those on the fence, or for those who think this is finally too expensive, what are the other options? Remember, there are always other options, no matter what the people in power want to claim. As Supervisor Heidi Wegleitner told Tone Madison, “People lack imagination about how things can be different.”

There’s still the open question of how much the original plan of building atop the Public Safety Building (PSB) would cost. The county never did get a second opinion, as its consultants recommended, or any price estimate. That’s because the sheriff (at the time, Dave Mahoney) wanted to force through the most spending on a jail he could, and people just went along with claims it was too expensive to reinforce the existing structure.

We also don’t know how much it would cost to renovate and modernize the CCB floors. This option was thrown out as too expensive back when the jail plan was $66 million, but is it too expensive compared to a $200 million building? Thanks to Sheriff Barrett’s “shipping” of incarcerated people to jails outside Dane County, we already have an empty wing of the CCB. The wings could be refurbished one at a time, likely faster than building an all-new building. Of course, if we’d done that from the start, we could have been done with the process years ago. Why didn’t we take that path? Well, it wasn’t what the sheriff wanted.

There’s also the path of simply holding less people pre-trial. If we have people with addiction problems or people who don’t have housing, putting them in expensive-to-run jail cells that don’t actually solve their problems is just foolish. We even had a nice accidental trial of this exact effect during COVID—even though we didn’t do nearly enough to get people out. Research has found that reduced jail bookings during COVID resulted in reduced re-arrests and recidivism. (I suspect that my calls to look more carefully at how we use bail are why Dave Mahoney confusingly claimed in a now-deleted social media post I have called for “violence against Black people”.)

Is our use of bail actually keeping us safer? Most research is pointing towards no, including in real-world trials of jurisdictions that either abolish or cut way back on holding people for cash bail. Our neighbors to the south in Illinois are experimenting with this change right now, and jail populations are declining. Bail is freedom for the rich, and cages for the poor… and that’s the Wisconsin way, apparently.

Dane County has actually done a passable job of starting to decarcerate, compared to some places in the US. Our jail population has not risen, while the county population has gone up. But any decarceration has mostly been for white people. We have not solved the racial biases, at all. As of January 10, 55% of our jail population is Black. That’s mostly due to Madison Police Department arrests, which the county doesn’t have direct control over; but it’s also due to how Wisconsin decides to hold people pre-trial with AI-powered risk assessment.

Better still than these band-aid options—like expanding electronic monitoring, or not keeping arrested people in jail with cash bail pre-trial—would be improving (and properly funding) our systems to help people before they end up in the crosshairs of the punishment system via an arrest. If we’re going to actually fix our racially biased systems, spending money on cementing those systems is in direct conflict with fixing them. This seems obvious, but let’s spell it out carefully. If we didn’t spend all these millions on this jail project, we could directly spend it on actual justice reform.

We still haven’t built out the county’s planned Crisis Triage Center, intended to help people in crisis without grinding them up in the prison pipeline. The county provided $11 million in funding for this back in its 2021 budget, but there are ongoing legal issues with state regulations and we have nothing to show yet. We could expand unarmed behavioral health response (CARES) to be county-wide and 24/7. We could fund better addiction care, which the County Board is also attempting to take up at its January 18 meeting. Or many other ideas in the pipeline that are lacking funding, political willpower, or both.

But we’ll only try those things, and fund them well, if enough of the county board is able to stand up to the Sheriff and demand different solutions.

As Tone Madison has covered previously, the county still hasn’t taken many of the mitigation steps recommended in this 2015 report. The county has simply not considered other paths forward, including paths recommended by consultants we paid for. And it’s worth remembering that as we build out a spendy new jail, we also have to operate it, and operating costs have been carefully danced around during this whole debacle.

Carceral excuses

Our jail and prison population in America is racially biased to an extreme, and it’s especially nasty right here in Wisconsin. This is both an effect of and an engine of inequality, both locally and writ large. The sooner we come to grips with that, the sooner we can stop building giant, wasteful shrines to incarceration and actually invest in solving the root problems underlying our inequality. At the current pace our leaders are changing things, we’ll never actually undo our disparities in Dane County. 

It’s a good idea to contact your supervisor and ask them to vote no. The reason this “investment” in the jail has been the main option over the last decade is because our board and county executive have only really been listening to the Dane County Sheriff’s Office, which has been demanding this single choice. That’s not surprising. If the board actually decides to tighten the purse strings on this project, that could force the sheriff, county executive, and our whole county to finally consider some of the other options that have been implicitly off the table.

It shouldn’t be up to us citizens or activists to untangle the horrors of our American mass incarceration machine. It shouldn’t be up to us to come up with the alternatives. We should force the people in charge of the machine to come up with options that are better than spending $200 million on a jail… options that actually help the people of Dane County.

While the powers that be have tried to make this jail spending feel inevitable, we have not built it yet. We also haven’t fixed most of our system’s racist biases or invested enough in the parts of our community that are in need. Until there are shovels in the ground, we should fight against spending on racist, harmful incarceration.

And if they do start building these shiny cages, finally? Oh, you can expect surprise costs to continue to pop up. We’ll still be fighting to get our county to care more about people in bad situations before they end up in the big, stupid cube of cages. There’ll just be less money in the county coffers to do things that are actually useful. Maybe the sheriff will be happy for a few years, though. Until we absolutely must build a new set of cages again.