In 2010, our Coalition hosted the Visionary Community Opportunities Conference to discover what the problems were that our community was facing with incarceration:
“What were the problems the taxpayers had (since the County had produced their vision to build a huge 2450 jail. Their plan was based on the jail industry business speculation that crime was inevitably rising. We disagreed.”
We had already spoken to the County Executive and to a meeting he held with 24 “stakeholders”. While polite, they had expressed no real interest in our ideas. That seemed odd, for it was clear that prevention, intervention and rehabilitation was entirely logical. So, what was the underlying problem?
The disconnect in rational thinking was huge. It was like they were speculating on jail industry growth to double, then double, and double again. They had already built a new jail…so why jump from 400 to 800 beds, to one that would eventually house 2450 people? That sounded preposterous, it sounded backwards to what a healthy community should be striving for. Financially this put hard, expensive costs as the top priority for the County, and we couldn’t figure out why they would plan for this, when we had so many other problems to solve. It was contraindicated to the public’s health.
So we invited over 20 speakers, and had about 80 people show up to come share with us their ideas of how to reverse the trend, or at least do it differently. Here is the operating model that emerged, and we turned it into a chart that showed that the turn around point was at the point of arrest. We distributed this chart to the authorities – and to our amazement, they did not change course.
They wanted their jail, and this started the Coalition on a deeper dive into: “WHY? Where was the tipping point to change course?”
