- Some counties are renovating or building new jails.
- Criminal justice reformers want to see fewer people in jails.
- Efforts are underway to divert people to crisis centers and drug treatment. But it's not enough yet.
Franklin County Sheriff Dallas Baldwin strolls through the wide, brightly lit hallways of the new $350 million jail and opens the door to a medical wing that looks strikingly like an urgent care clinic.
Exam rooms with privacy curtains. Flat screen TVs in the waiting room playing healthy lifestyle messages. A phlebotomy lab, x-ray services and a pharmacy are on site.
Down the hall is an 80-bed unit designed to medically manage people addicted to opioids. Open lines of sight, private counseling rooms, medical equipment and a Gatorade station are all designed to help jailers keep an eye on people going through withdrawals.
In Ohio, about 16,500 people are in jail on any given night and 300,000 are booked into jails each year. Jails hold people immediately after arrest, who are awaiting trial and are serving less than 12-month sentence.
Corrections staff across Ohio and the nation are struggling to handle complex medical conditions, addictions and serious mental illnesses. Between 2020 and 2023 in Ohio, at least 220 people died while in jail custody. About one-third of the deaths were drug related and another 29% were suicides.
Baldwin and Geoff Stobart, his chief deputy, said the county designed and built the new jail with these challenges in mind.
"I think this jail was built to offer the best care possible. That's been the approach. Anything we can think of, anything we can offer, we do. You can imagine the same person in here, if they were on the street, they would not be receiving this type of care," Baldwin said. "When they come in here, they get the best care we can offer them."
Once completed, the jail is expected to replace two antiquated facilities and hold up to 2,200 people. Franklin County plans to close the jail on Jackson Pike once the new jail is fully built out and staffed.
Franklin County operates one of the largest jail systems in Ohio, cycling through 20,000 people each year. Since 2020, it has also had the highest number of in-custody deaths of any county across Ohio: 25.
Jail Building Boom: Adding beds across Ohio
Sheriffs, mental health advocates, legislators, families and others disagree about the best way to address these problems: renovate or build more lockups, reduce incarceration numbers, divert people with serious drug and mental health problems to appropriate care, provide better care inside jails.
Some Ohio sheriffs are revamping their approach to corrections, paying more attention to behavioral health needs, drug addiction and medical care. In some counties, they're spending millions of dollars on extreme makeovers or entirely new jails.
The Hamilton County Justice Center transformed office space into more recovery pods with a $2.5 million Ohio state capital grant. The pods feature natural light and more comfortable mattresses for people recovering from addiction.
Hamilton County Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey created a position for the jail's first addiction coordinator, who connects people with resources and treatment. McGuffey said she wants everyone in the recovery treatment pods to sign a commitment to work on their addiction.
Since 2021, the DeWine administration has earmarked $175 million in state money to help counties renovate or replace jails. Several new jails will expand bed capacities. In Gallia County, for example, $5.5 million in state money helped build a new 120-bed facility, replacing an 11-bed lockup used since 1964.
So far 23 jails have received state money for renovations, expansions or replacements. Now some legislators are talking about earmarking another $250 million for jail construction and renovations.
For many counties, the only way they'll be able to comply with state standards prescribing space requirements for incarcerated people is to renovate or expand. For example, the new Franklin County Jail will replace the jail on Jackson Pike where inmates report that there aren't enough beds so people have to sleep on the concrete floor.
A call to end mass incarceration
Adding jail beds, though, is controversial. Criminal justice reformers want to see fewer people locked up − either through bail reform, diverting people into treatment services or both.
Cuyahoga County Jail Coalition's LaTonya Goldsby said the focus should be diverting people from jail and getting them the mental health and drug treatment services they need. And inside the jails, culture change is essential, she said.
“We are well aware that it’s not the building that’s killing people. It’s the culture of the COs (corrections officers) that’s killing people.”
Joel Pruce, a professor at the University of Dayton and a member of the Montgomery County Jail Coalition, said he would prefer to see more alternative response options for people in crisis so the default is not booking them in jail.
“I think we are still incarcerating way too many people, particularly people who are being held pretrial for reasons that do not threaten harm to themselves or others. I mean, that jail should be very small, even in a country like ours," he said.
ACLU of Ohio Chief Lobbyist Gary Daniels said punishing people for drug addiction and mental health issues isn’t working and neither is mass incarceration.
"There needs to be a fundamental reform of how and why we incarcerate people here in Ohio and in the United States. The drug war in Ohio has never left. It’s barely eased over the years,” Daniels said. “We have an incarceration first policy with regard to what we do with these folks.”
Bail– money and or conditions– is intended to ensure that someone will show up forcourt appearances. In some cases, ifsomeone is particularly dangerous or a flight risk, judges can decide tohold them until trial.
For years, reformers have inched the state toward less reliance on money bail– a system that lets rich defendants pay their way out of jail while poor defendants sit behind bars.They argued that less reliance on cash bail would be more fair and reduce the cost of incarceration that taxpayers shoulder.
But in 2022, Ohio voters approved a constitutional amendment that makes getting out on bail more difficult when it comes to serious crimes.
Jails are the de facto mental health hospitals
A disproportionate number of incarcerated people have serious mental illness, in part because society criminalizes mental health related behaviors, according to Kerstin Sjoberg of Disability Rights Ohio. Without adequate community mental health care or effective crisis response systems, people get caught up in jails, she said.
"There's just not enough. There is not enough mental health care, community-based, voluntary, trauma-informed mental health care that people actually want and need and will utilize," Sjoberg said.
Training law enforcement in crisis intervention, adding specialty courts focused on those with mental illness and providing better care behind bars is all part of the mission of Stepping Up. It's a national program to divert people with mental illness from jails.
While serving on the Ohio Supreme Court, Evelyn Lundberg Stratton used the bully pulpit to focus on people with mental illness caught in the criminal justice system. Eventually, she left the bench early to focus on the issues full-time as the director of the Stepping Up Initiative in Ohio.
Stratton can quickly outline a menu of solutions:
- Don't take someone in a mental health crisis to jail. Ohio needs more crisis centers for these people.
- Jails need to provide appropriate mental health treatment, including medically managing withdrawals, administering psychotropic drugs and offering therapy.
- Guards need to be trained in crisis intervention techniques.
- Jails need to help people in getting Medicaid coverage for when they're released.
- Ohio needs more supportive housing for people leaving jails, so they don't end up homeless and returning to jail.
Stratton said the state now provides funding to county jails for medication assisted treatment and reimbursem*nt for psychotropic drugs, which are often very expensive.
Ohio should also apply for a federal waiver to allow for Medicaid coverage of people while they are in jails or prisons − that could shift costs off the counties and onto the federal government, Stratton said. Ten states have already applied; Ohio is not one of them.
Ohio Medicaid Director Maureen Corcoran said her team is looking into what it'd take to apply for the federal waiver and what the upside would be. She noted that the federal rules prohibit cost shifting and jails would have to become Medicaid providers. "It brings all of that Medicaid administrivia into the equation and that's kind of a whole learning process that we're understanding, particularly from other states that are a little further along," Corcoran said.
DeWine, though, wants to focus on improving the use of Ohio's 1,100 state psychiatric hospital beds so that they're more available to those in need. Currently, 93% of the beds are occupied by people sent there by court order so they can be restored to competency and stand trial. Some of those patients could be restored via outpatient treatment, Stratton said. That would also free up the state beds for others in need, including some who are ending up in jails now.
DeWine appointed a task force of experts, which began studying the issues in early April. The group plans to make recommendations by fall 2024.
Ohio Politics Explained: Dying Behind Bars
Laura Bischoff is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.
