Chad Slater-Scott
“Ask yourself: How could nearly $100 million be used to best serve the Johnson County community? We will be asked to weigh in on this question again in November. And we should send the same message we've already sent when asked to vote on this issue in 2000, 2012, 2013, and 2014: NO! Spending $94.5 million on a new jail with expanded capacity and new offices for the sheriff's department is not the best investment option to serve our community.
“It isn't surprising that the primary force behind this is the Johnson County Sheriff's Office, supported by several county supervisors and county planning officials. They have a vested interest in maintaining order through familiar institutional means: putting people in jail.
“The same stale argument that has been used before is being used again; supporters argue that the current jail, built in 1981, is outdated and expensive to maintain. They say a new jail would reduce the need to house people in other counties. Those arguments fail considering the facts. Johnson County’s own published jail statistics show that the average daily jail population has fallen dramatically from its peak. The county reported an average daily population of 161 in 2010, but only 83 in 2023, 86 in 2024, and 88 in 2025. In other words, the long-term trend is not a growing jail population. It is a smaller jail population than Johnson County had 15 years ago.
“Building a new jail doesn't even make fiscal sense. The main argument is that it costs to house prisoners in other counties that have capacity. True, Johnson County spent about $500,000 in 2025 housing inmates outside the county. Those are real costs, but they are nowhere near the cost of a new jail. Spending nearly $100 million to reduce some portion of a roughly $500,000 annual expense is not a fiscally conservative or financially rational tradeoff. It would take two centuries to spend $100 million dollars on housing inmates outside the county at the 2025 spending level!
“Beware: There is inherent danger in building new jails. When a county builds more jail beds, there is institutional pressure to use them; more people can be detained pretrial, more people can be held locally instead of diverted, and decision-makers may feel less urgency to invest in non-jail alternatives. We should not create a larger detention infrastructure without a plan to ensure it doesn't become normalized.
“Think about it again: We are being asked to invest nearly $100 million dollars in our community – on a jail!
“As Johnson County citizens, we should continue advocating for better investments in our community. Investments in people, not buildings and institutions. Investments in mental health crisis response, substance-use treatment, supportive housing, pretrial services, diversion programs, reentry support, and community-based alternatives to detention. Services that reduce repeat arrests instead of expanding jail capacity. Investments that add real value to the people who live in our community.
“Invest in care, not cages.
“I urge you to vote NO on this bond in November!”