Key Points
- Kansas City considers building a $250M municipal jail, but community input reveals little support.
- City has rented 105 beds from neighboring counties’ jails for $2.67M in 2022.
- In KC, 67.8% of people held before court, and 71.2% of people held after court in city jail are Black.
- Alternatives to incarceration include texting reminders and expanding specialty court systems.
Kansas City is looking into building a municipal detention center and held six community engagement sessions to gather community input that revealed little support for a jail that would cost around $250M to build.
The city has been without a municipal jail since 2009 and rented space from the Jackson County jail until the county nixed the agreement in 2019. KC and Jackson County initially had plans to build a joint jail facility, but those plans fell through. Since then the city has been exploring the idea of building its own facility.
The debate around the jail has been framed around four questions: How big should the jail be? What should be the nature of the jail? How should it be paid for? Where should the jail be located?
But Decarcerate KC, a group that looks to change policing and incarceration practices in the city, says that the bigger question is, does the city need a jail at all?
“It definitely seems like a lot of the community is in opposition to a city jail and that there’s not enough [interest] to justify it,” says Decarcerate KC member Sundiata Moon who attended several community engagement sessions.
Jail Costs
One of the main reasons given for opposing the jail is the cost. The city commissioned a needs assessment and an estimate for the cost of building the facility. In 2022 SFS Architecture said a stand-alone city jail would cost $245M to build. A separate estimate from JE Dunn Construction in 2023 puts the number between $240M and $256M. These figures do not account for maintenance and operating costs after the jail is built.
“The funding that they’re looking to use to build a jail could be better prioritized in other places,” says Moon.
Megan Case, KC’s administrator of corrections, says that In lieu of a jail, the city has rented 105 beds from neighboring Vernon and Johnson (MO) county jails. The city pays $60 a day per bed used in those facilities for a total cost of $2.67M.in 2022.
Who’s Put in City Jail
Case noted the types of charges the city houses inmates for are largely trespassing, theft, breaking into motor vehicles, resisting arrest, misdemeanor assault, and pretrial holding.
Decarcerate KC invited the left-leaning Prison Policy Initiative (PPI) to examine the arguments made for a new jail. They reviewed City Municipal Court records and found that the city uses municipal jail beds largely for low-level charges that are non-violent.
One third of people booked into the jail between Mar-Dec 2019 were booked for a violent crime. The remaining two thirds were booked for a mix of non-DUI traffic charges, theft, drug charges, vandalism, missing court, or resisting arrest.
The municipal court and jail doesn’t handle felony cases. In Missouri all drug possession and drug dealing charges are felonies meaning that the municipal court largely hears drug paraphernalia cases. The PPI also notes that assault becomes a felony ‘if someone knowingly causes physical injury to another person,’ meaning that the city jail would only handle assault charges where no one was physically hurt.
Further, statistics show a massive racial disparity in who the city jails. Although Kansas City is only 26.5% Black, 67.8% of people held before court, and 71.2% of people held after court in city jail are Black.
City Jail Stays are Short but Have Consequences
According to a city report, the average overall length of stay is less than a day. For those who are incarcerated pretrial, their average length of stay is 1.68 days.
The majority of people moving through a municipal jail have not been convicted of a crime. City jails isn’t a place where you go to serve a conviction, with the city’s needs assessment report showing that only 9.4% of people who appear in municipal court are sentenced to additional time.
The report doesn’t give exact numbers but the PPI says that figure insinuates that the vast majority of individuals housed in jail are there because they are unable to pay a monetary bond while awaiting trial.
While the city jail short stays are better than longer ones, studies show that even short stints of incarceration can be damaging. A University of Missouri-Kansas City study found 38% of those incarcerated for less than three days lost their job, had to change jobs, or faced consequences at work because of their incarceration. Another 30% said incarceration of three days or less negatively impacted their housing and 32% said that it had a negative impact on their children.
Alternatives to Incarceration
Mayor Quinton Lucas appointed a 10-member Alternatives to Incarceration Commission in June to study ways to reduce incarceration while still keeping the community safe. Since that time, the commission has heard a number of proposals including rehabilitative services for substance abuse or mental health issues to help confront the root causes of crime.
Chief Judge of the Kansas Court of Appeals Karen Arnold-Burger says judges face challenges determining who is most at risk of not appearing, but on average, around 20% of people miss their court date. She also says simple text message reminders of court dates have had a “tremendous effect” on lowering the number of people missing court.
New York City has experimented with texting reminders instead of issuing a cash bail, and an Oregon county did the same and said it saved them over a million dollars in a year.
Judge Arnold-Burger gives the analogy of emergency rooms being overwhelmed in decades past. She says the industry did studies to ease the burden on ERs and added urgent care facilities and doctors offices expanded hours. She says the incarceration system needs to do the same; look for alternatives to jail, which is expensive, has negative effects and often isn’t the best remedy.
There’s a lot of push for Kansas City to expand their specialty court system, which includes a drug court, mental health court, and a veterans treatment court. The city also has a specialty women’s court that will open in a matter of months. These diversionary programs focus on treatment and rehabilitation versus punishment, however they are entirely voluntary and those going through the program are monitored closely for up to a year.
In a memo to the city council, administrators with the Kansas City Municipal Courts say most people in municipal jail have either mental health issues, substance use disorders or both.
The Prison Policy Initiative says that KC’s short lengths of stay “make clear that true treatment is not occuring behind bars.”
The alternatives to incarceration commission is heavily considering a pre-arrest hotline similar to a program instituted in Miami. The program would send community responders rather than police to address issues related to substance abuse, mental illness or homelessness.
Advocates say jailing doesn’t address the root causes of petty crimes that are being punished within municipal jail and many are calling for simple ‘ticket and release’ for nonviolent misdemeanors.
“I think a lot of people learned during COVID, when the jails had to let a lot of people go, that perhaps the world doesn’t fall apart if jails aren’t full,” says Judge Arnold-Burger. “Actually more people showed up for court.”
The city’s alternatives to incarceration commission will present their recommendations alongside findings from the community meetings to the full city council Jan. 9.
