Urgent Call for Action: Lancaster County's Criminal Justice Dilemma Demands a Local Solution
While the overcrowding of Nebraska’s state prison system and the recent purchase of land for constructing a new prison facility have been making local headlines, Lincoln and Lancaster County voters shouldn’t overlook the crisis looming on West O Street at our own county jail. Faced with overcrowding in that facility, which largely houses individuals awaiting trial who haven’t yet been found guilty of any crime, the Lancaster County Board of Commissioners approved $1,095,000 in the annual budget they passed last week for jail boarding contracts. This decision essentially means that Lancaster County taxpayers will be bankrolling the rental of jail cells in other Nebraska counties for individuals that the Lancaster County jail doesn’t have space to hold.
It doesn’t have to be this way. Violent crime rates are trending down, and a growing number of those held in the county jail are really there due to untreated mental health and substance abuse conditions. Turns out, Lancaster County has good solutions for helping these individuals experience recovery and avoid repeat interactions with the criminal justice system. One of those solutions is our Community Corrections Department which facilitates programs like house arrest, mental health and veteran’s diversion, and drug court. These programs cost taxpayers very little to operate compared to the jail, and in the long term, they reduce the number of repeat offenders. This makes such programs a win-win; people get the treatment they need and the community is safer in the long run.
On May 4, 2023 an interfaith coalition of more than 20 local faith communities, called Justice in Action, asked local officials to invest financially in the expansion of these Community Corrections programs to prevent the kind of overcrowding that we are now seeing in the jail. The group followed up with the Lancaster County Attorney’s office to ask that they do their part to make this possible by expanding eligibility for these programs. Both the County Commissioners and the County Attorney agreed in principle that we have good Community Corrections programs that are a better solution than jail. It’s time for these public officials to truly work together to make the expansion of Community Corrections and other preventative services possible so that our County can stop hemorrhaging money for a jail that does little to make our community safer - about 60% of the people who serve time in the county jail without participation in Community Corrections services offend again and are rebooked within 5 years.
The leadership of Justice in Action recognizes that the Commissioners felt they were presented with an impossible and urgent choice that came down to safety- the County can’t have people sleeping on the floor in an overcrowded jail. We agree that such a situation must be urgently remedied. We also believe that savvy leaders should identify ways to work across party and departmental lines to hold all parts of the criminal justice system accountable for effective change that will address the problem long-term. If boarding contracts are the only way to address overcrowding this month, then local officials should make a plan to ensure that the cause of overcrowding is actually addressed in the months that follow instead of budgeting more than $1 million for a short-sighted, stop-gap measure. Such reactive measures would improve community safety, save taxpayer dollars, and treat our neighbors involved in the criminal justice system with the dignity they deserve as human beings. Thousands of Lancaster County residents are ready to support our officials if they are willing to put in the hard work to change a system that is clearly not serving our community.
What anyone with reservations about the headline-making state prison expansion must realize is that every single person who enters a state prison has first been incarcerated in a county jail. In Lancaster County we have a choice. We can pursue business as usual by continuing to pour money into our county jail while we complain about decisions made at the state level, or we can choose to begin solving the criminal justice problem for ourselves locally by working together and investing in rehabilitative programs that better serve everyone.
-Rev. Beth Graverholt, Executive Director, Justice in Action