We’re against spending nearly $100,000,000 for a new jail. Here’s Why.

On Wednesday, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors got a presentation from Shive-Hattery on the updated plan for a new, $96,000,000 jail and sheriff’s office. On Thursday, the Board of Supervisors entered into a purchase agreement for land, which wasn’t provided to the public in advance, that they on begrudgingly admitted was for the $96,000,000 jail and sheriff’s office. On Friday, Johnson County Deserves Better launched in opposition to what is expected to be an ask of the voters this November for $96,000,000 to pay for this new jail and sheriff’s office.

What follows, and the art on this post, is from that campaign, and posted in its entirety in solidarity.

Johnson County is hurtling towards a nearly $100,000,000 investment in a brand-new, bigger jail. If approved, it will be one of the largest locally funded public investments in Johnson County in memory, yet there is still so much we don’t know – and still many unanswered questions – about the plan.

Johnson County deserves better

What we do know is troubling. 

Johnson County voters have routinely rejected building new, bigger jails – five times since 1976 – decisions that have saved us money both by avoiding the construction of a costly single-purpose building and by forcing our local criminal punishment infrastructure to find alternatives to expensive detention and incarceration. We know that this time, however, instead of engaging the broader community about what a solution should look like, the planning committee at the start involved only County Sheriff Brad Kunkel, the Sheriff’s Department’s command staff, Johnson County’s facilities manager, and County Attorney Rachel Zimmermann Smith, which has delivered a plan that is simply the Sheriff’s wishlist.

We know this project is wildly more expensive than the $10.5 to $15 million it was estimated, by Johnson County’s engineering consultant in 2024, that it would cost to rebuild the existing jail at its current size. The Johnson County Board of Supervisors wants to borrow $96 million, paid off over 10 years through increased property taxes, to build a new jail that would allow the incarceration of almost double the current population — going from 65 to 120 with eventual expansion to imprisoning 240 people — all while Johnson County’s incarceration rate has declined.  

We know any extra jail capacity will be commandeered by ICE and put our vulnerable immigrant neighbors at risk. And we know local law enforcement is already collaborating with ICE, because state law gives us no other choice.

We know that racism is baked into the criminal punishment system, even in Johnson County, where Black people are booked into the jail at about five times the rate of white people. 

We know that Johnson County’s jail population has trended downward — look at the numbers from the Sheriff’s Department itself — and we know that there is more we can do to encourage this trend with jail diversion and other community-focused programs. Lower incarceration rates are a good thing. And despite our self-identity as a forward-thinking community willing to invest in prevention and diversion, we are still behind neighbors like Linn County, which invested in mental health reentry resources when state funding was eliminated.

Johnson County deserves honesty and transparency

While Johnson County leaders have made many claims about why it’s necessary to build an expensive, new, larger jail, there are precious few facts to support their claims. 

We’ve been told the jail has reached the end of its life, yet the local engineering firm hired to assess the building’s structure wrote unequivocally, “Axiom Consultants would not state, at this time, that the building is in danger of imminent structural failures of any sort,” and noted that, due to its construction, the building “is durable and resistant to age related damage in ways many other buildings aren’t.”

Certainly there has been a long policy of deferred maintenance of the building. Sheriff Kunkel will point to cosmetic issues of stained ceiling tiles, chipped wall paint, and cracks in the brick facade as his proof. But is this proof the taxpayers should bear a $100 million burden? Beyond the recently completed roof and exterior work, repairs to the building were estimated at less than $2 million by engineering consultants in 2024 — just 2 percent of the planned bond request. 

And the Johnson County Jail isn’t even dirty; the State Jail Inspector wrote in his 2025 report, “the Johnson County Jail is the cleanest that I have observed.” 

Johnson County deserves facts

We’ve been told that building a new, larger, nearly $100 million jail will save taxpayer money by eliminating the need to transport people to other counties and paying to incarcerate them there. However, according to the data from the Sheriff’s Department, out of 1,211 people transported out of county in 2025, fewer than half were moved due to overcrowding. Even still, in 25 years, Johnson County has paid less than $650,000 a year to transport and detainpeople in other counties — at that rate it would take about 150 years to spend what this new jail plan will cost.

The claimed savings rely heavily on it costing less per day to incarcerate people in Johnson County than elsewhere, yet this claim isn’t substantiated. While it costs $50 to $120 per person per day to incarcerate someone in another county’s jail, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has not been willing or able to quantify what the cost per person per day will be in the new jail nor has it been forthcoming with the current daily cost per person in the existing jail. How are Johnson County taxpayers to believe that it will actually cost less per day to keep people here in a new jail, before we even begin to factor in the nearly $100 million in capital cost, when we don’t even have the facts about current costs?  

We’ve been told the condition of the current jail is inhumane, but there is nothing to indicate the Sheriff’s Department would prioritize human dignity in a new jail. Being incarcerated locally in Johnson County doesn’t even increase incarcerated people’s access to their families. The Sheriff’s Department currently refuses to allow in-person visitation, forcing families to use costly video calls through a third-party for-profit company rather than allowing them to sit in the same room together with their loved ones. The new jail plans don’t seem to allow human contact like on-site visiting areas, let alone allow for basic human needs — according to the schematic designs, incarcerated people will have no access to, or even direct views of, the outside world.

We agree the current jail is inhumane, but a new jail won’t solve the existing problems. The deaths in the Johnson County Jail under Sheriff Kunkel’s watch were not because of conditions in the building; they were due to poor policy and staff disregard for the human beings under their care. 

The proposed new jail would have more capacity for people who need treatment for mental illness than either the current jail or Guidelink Center. However, jails are not where we should treat mental illness.

Johnson County deserves answers

Voters and community members still don’t know exactly what we’re being asked to fund, how much it will really cost to build, how much it will cost to operate, or the answers to 96 million other questions. 

Johnson County deserves disclosure of the true costs and transparency about the true reasoning behind these “needed” plans.

The burden of proof is on Sheriff Kunkel, County Attorney Zimmermann Smith, and Supervisors Jon Green, Lisa Green-Douglass, and outgoing Rod Sullivan, who often use the word “need” when discussing a new jail and the wishlist put forward by the Sheriff’s Department. These leaders haven’t definitively shown why we need a new place to hold virtual-reality training, or need to a new place to park Johnson County’s military surplus mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) vehicle, or need to build private offices and K9 kennels larger than the cells for incarcerated people. 

For something Johnson County leaders have been trying to sell us for years, there should be more answers. Or at least some answers. Johnson County voters shouldn’t be asked to take any of this on faith. When trust in government is at an all-time low, Johnson County government officials should be expected to show their work.

Johnson County deserves investments aligning with our priorities

This spring, voters soundly rejected pro-jail Board of Supervisors incumbents and candidates in favor of jail-skeptical ones — Johnson County leaders should stop and listen to the people they serve.

We imagine there are better ways to spend nearly $100 million. 

We imagine ending homelessness in Johnson County, not a jail. We imagine funding childcare so parents can work and care providers can make a good wage, not a jail. We imagine community investments tripling those seen from the American Rescue Plan Act, which had a transformational impact on Johnson County and its cities, not a jail. We imagine providing real mental healthcare in the community and in schools and in libraries, not a jail. We imagine making sure our neighbors are no longer hungry, not a jail. We imagine building crisis response infrastructure that acts before there are victims and doesn’t rely on incarceration, not a jail. We imagine being creative and trying something new. Not another jail.

We’re voting “no” to spending $96,000,000 for a new jail on Nov. 3 because Johnson County deserves better.

A Handy Dandy Guide

Mariame Kaba in 2014, and republished in We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, offers a quick and timeless guide to assess reforms:

1) Proposals and legislation to offer reparations to victims of police violence and their families.

2) Proposals and legislation to decrease and redirect policing and prison funds to other social goods.

3) Proposals and legislation for (elected) independent civilian police accountability boards with power to investigate, discipline, fire police officers and administrators (with some serious caveats).*

4) Proposals and legislation to disarm the police.

5) Proposals to simplify the process of dissolving existing police departments.

6) Proposals and legislation for data transparency (stops, arrests, budgeting, weapons, etc.).

7) Ultimately, the only way that we will address oppressive policing is to abolish the police. Therefore, all of the “reforms” that focus on strengthening the police or “morphing” policing into something more invisible but still as deadly should be opposed.

Bluntly

Electoral politics are a blunt instrument, and we will always be forced to make compromises and pick imperfect candidates. Results suggest trends, not clear paradigm shifts.

Last night’s results in Johnson County, a primary run during increasingly pointed conversations around the appropriateness of spending $100 million on a new jail (and, as Sheriff Kunkel makes sure to point out, office), suggest continued skepticism in Iowa City, where District 4 and District 5 both nominated (and, because they’re Iowa City, almost certainly will elect) candidates who were skeptically pro-jail over candidates who were enthusiastically pro-jail.

Both Mandi Remington and V Fixmer-Oriaz have been accused of dancing around their support of a new jail (I might suggest they offered nuance) and not being appropriately submissive to law enforcement and enthusiastic in their jail support.

Both won by good margins against real opponents with experienced, establishment backing.

Difficult to not see that as a trend.

Who Gets To Define Public Safety?

Yours truly, on another Saturday morning special episode of Not Quite Quorum podcast, with (partner and city councilor extraordinaire) Laura Bergus discussing the proposed new Johnson County jail, focusing on how we define “public safety,” and why it must be different than just the reactive State punishment system. Also Lauren Whitehead’s letter to the editor in Little Village:

The other thing that I just wanted to object to in Lauren’s piece was she refers to operating a jail is something the county is legally and morally obligated to maintain.

And I just want to take a quick moment to remind our listeners that things we have legal obligations to are not the same things that we have moral obligations to. Those are different things.

We have a moral obligation for accountability. And that’s not punishment.

So trying to turn this into a moral obligation of local government is kind of gross, actually.

Character Assassinations

If a public figure treats people poorly, and those people then speak out about how they were treated, those statements are not “character assassinations.”

Running on an Issue

There are a lot of different issues you can run for office on, and infinite was to prioritize them. You can talk about your top issues as a matter of fairness, a matter of justice delayed, even as a matter of reluctance but pragmatism.

Or you can simply say “we have a jail to replace” without nuance or qualification.

I’m left seeing no difference between candidates on incarceration and looking for who can at least bring a sober and collaborative leadership to the Board of Supervisors.

The GOP Didn’t Get What They Wanted, But They Got Something Even Better

Here in Johnson County, registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by better than 2 to 1, and the last time we elected a registered Republican to a county office was John Etheredge who won a March 2013 special election, served less than two year, and was defeated in the subsequent general election in 2014. You have to go back decades further to find another Republican, and it’s, unsurprisingly, a county sheriff.

We just don’t elect Republicans here in the People’s Republic.

Local and state Republicans have widely framed this as a lack of “rural representation,” despite seats consistently being held by Democrats who live outside of the urban core. Their solution has long been to require we elect county supervisors by districts, erroneously believing we would somehow end up with at least one fully-rural district wrapped around metro area1.

Never mind that Johnson County was always going to end up with a Coralville district, North Liberty district, two Iowa City districts and a fifth very Iowa City district. In 2025 the state legislature decided to make Johnson County, and other counties with regent universities, adopt districts and make every elected supervisor run again.

The Republicans didn’t get the impossible district they wanted, and the final districting plan was pretty much what everyone who knew the rules for map drawing expected2.

No matter. What the Republicans got was even better: Democrats in disarray total fucking chaos.

Throwing all the seats on the ballot at once takes so-called silly season to a whole new level. From my conversations, folks working for the Board of Supervisors recognize that election season makes their jobs harder, but at least usually there’s two or three supervisors who aren’t up for election to temper the disruption, and the previous all-at-large set up meant incumbents weren’t forced to run head-to-head for a seat3.

The result is that we are in one of the ugliest cycles in a while, and that’s counting the March 2025 Iowa City Council special election Oliver Weilein won over Ross Nusser.

It’s spilling over into the board room, with obvious chippiness and condensation becoming a regular feature of work sessions and formal meetings. There is a long history of bad behavior in the board room, made more apparent by the increased access to video4, but this primary cycle is a whole new level of vitriol and both veiled and direct personal attacks.

Maybe we try to recenter around facts and care?

  1. John Deeth has done a good job of pointing out why, under current Iowa anti-gerrymander laws, an all-rural district would be impossible, but for the life of me I can’t find the post on his always informative blog. ↩︎
  2. There are three Republicans running for seats, and my gut says they all lose in the general. I think Phil Hemmingway in District 2, my district, has the best shot of any Republican. The district is a little more rural and Republican and he’s got some name recognition because he’s run and won local races before. ↩︎
  3. My guess is that districts will further entrench incumbents because running as a challenger will be harder: you’ll have to set your sights on a specific seat a current supervisor “owns” instead of running for one of two or three. ↩︎
  4. There has been, in my perception, increased scrutiny, too, as more urbanites began to see this as something that did affect them and was worth paying attention to. I’d peg it to everything 2020 and American Rescue Plan Act funding. ↩︎

What’s New in the (In)Decision for a New County Jail?

Yours truly, on a post-coffee-on-a-Saturday-morning special episode on the weekly Not Quite Quorum podcast, where (partner and city councilor extraordinaire) Laura Bergus discuss the happenings of the past week around Johnson County’s (in)decision to push for a new jail:

I’ve said before that there is a single litmus test in local politics.

I feel like this is where the line is drawn: are you willing to go along with the status quo of our carceral system or not? And I think there is an unwillingness or lack of interest in understanding why people might question the status quo.

Listen wherever you get your podcasts.