Sunday, April 27, 2008

Portune, Paddock Road, and the Future of the Jail

Posted by The Dean of Cincinnati

Hamilton County Commissioner Todd Portune responds to our recent inquiry.

Dear [Dean]:

Thank you for the opportunity to address these two issues and hopefully to clarify for you and others the questions that you assert are circulating.

The Paddock Road site [formerly the Lewis Center] is owned by the City of Cincinnati.  The County deeded the property to the city about 6 years ago.  It was the culmination of a very long, and public, process about that site and potential uses of the site.  The county deeded the property to the city to be used for positive economic development or residential housing construction.  The site had long been rumored to be the county’s preferred location for a jail, and a juvenile jail, at that.  I led opposition to such a use while on city council and did so again when I became county commissioner.  I was successful in blocking its use as a jail with the transfer of ownership to the city.

I can tell you that in all of our conversations about jail locations this site has never come up.  The community is dead set against it and the county has no intention of working at odds with the community.  If any new jail is to be built it will happen in Camp Washington.

As for the second question you have raised, you have asked what my plans are at present for a jail.  At the beginning of the year I laid out what the county’s approach is at this stage.  Number one, we have analyzed and listened to the voters who have spoken loud and clear that they will not support new taxes for our corrections needs.  Accordingly, whatever we do we will do it within whatever existing means and resources we have and we will not raise taxes for the effort.

Second, we are back at square one on what our overall corrections facilities needs are.  We still need to work on a replacement for Queensgate and it also makes good fiscal sense to consolidate facilities if we can.  But what exactly that is or looks like has not been determined and will not be determined until other initiatives and reforms have run their course.

We said all along that we intended to reform the criminal justice system in Hamilton County and that we also wanted to provide greater resources for treatment and care.  Our approach on the treatment and care and reform ends was twofold - raise more money for preventative and proactive work and raise more money to do more once people have come into our hands through arrest.

The argument last year against Issue 27 only painted half the picture by focusing on the incremental money in Issue 27 for care.  The argument was that jail is a poor substitute for treatment.  We agreed and tried to tell people that Issue 27 was not the only approach we were taking but that it was limited to what happens once someone is in jail, or arrested.  We also raised new money through the Mental Health and Recovery Services Levy for treatment.  Those new funds were the subject of the Mental Health Summit convened last week.

The problem we face, in part, is the Mental Health Levy funds were only supposed to go toward enhanced proactive work but the defeat of Issue 27 may force us to have to use some of those funds to beef up our treatment post arrest because we lack adequate funds to do all that is necessary for people who have been arrested and incarceratyed.

In any event, the approach is to complete our total assessment of the system and identify the changes to the system and to the delivery of treatment, care and services necessary to prevent crimes from occurring and to reduce recidivism.  Once identified, we will implement all that we are able to do and then observe and track the impact they are having on our criminal population.  When we have enough information to be able to determine trends and to be able to make judgments we will then revisit the issue of facilities and space and make our decisions based upon what the system requires at that point.

There is no exact timetable for this to run its course.  We are close to receiving the recommendations from the CJC and, once received, we will decide what to implement.  Those decisions and the observations that follow will likely take us through the end of this year.

If you have any further questions please feel free to reply.

Todd

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