At its work session on Oct. 16, 2025, the Johnson County Board of Supervisors took the next step toward building a new jail. Megan Woolard of The Gazette:
The Johnson County Board of Supervisors is moving forward with plans for a new sheriff’s office and 120-bed jail. The decision comes after more than a year of disagreement between board members over the size of the proposed facility.
Board members have advocated for a number of beds ranging from 92 to 140 after Shive Hattery completed a space needs assessment in the summer of 2024 that called for an $80 million, 140-bed facility.
Following discussion at a work session Thursday, the board agreed to move forward with plans to build the footprint of a building with enough space for 140 beds but to only include 120 beds in the initial build.
Lots of the conversation around a new Johnson County jail has led to the suggestion that folks who, like me, question the findings of the “needs assessment”1; have some basic requests for what should be included; or ask “why this” are people who simply hate cops and are opposed to everything “new jail.” So let me first be clear about my stance:
The current building is not a workable long-term solution.
There are real concerns, and doing nothing fails to address those concerns.
There are real concerns about long-term commitment to current and expanded diversion efforts, and asking for trust fails to address those concerns.
Induced demand for incarceration is real.
The right number of beds is zero.
I’m not dumb. Zero isn’t realistically achievable tomorrow or next year or in a decade or within the theoretical lifespan of this new facility. But we know goals matter, and we have plenty of examples of setting the goal of zero and working towards it. Shooting for zero is much different than planning for 120 with room to expand to 140.
We do this ’til we free us.
In short, I oppose this proposal.
How Many Beds is 120 Beds?
Figuring out how many beds a specific number of beds actually is can be surprisingly tricky. Here’s Woolard:
When the current jail was opened in 1981, it was built with a capacity for 46 beds and the ability to add bunks to increase capacity to 92. However, Sheriff Brad Kunkel said the jail has an operational capacity of 65.
The number of beds in the current jail was increased to the doubled number soon after it opened. When we see a formal proposal for the voters, it will be important to ask how much additional capacity the Johnson County Sheriff will be able to add.
Is a 120-bed jail really a 240-bed jail? How do we know? If we can’t offer a straightforward number for capacity now, how can we state it so matter-of-factly for the future?
If our goal is zero, we would build no more than the 92-bed facility. We would bring inmates outside of the jail for enrichment and other programs, invest heavily in social supports we know work and find more, and build our capacity for new and existing diversion programs.
We Shouldn’t Build Extra Cages Just In Case
Supervisor Rod Sullivan offered road salt as an analogy, both on his blog and in the meeting, to suggest it’s simply common-sense to build extra capacity for the future:
It just makes sense. You have friends coming over for dinner. Is it better to have a little too much food, or not quite enough? We deal with this all the time in county government. Do we want to have a few too many ballots, or not enough ballots? Do we want to have a little extra salt and sand, or not enough? Do we want to have a little extra money to get through the year, or not enough? The answers are obvious! The same thing applies to jail beds. Do we want to have a few extra, or not enough? I want a few extra!
You can argue, “if you build it, they will just fill it.” But there is no evidence to back that up. Look at my earlier examples. Do we put down extra salt and sand just because we have it? No, we carry it forward. Do we spend extra money just because we have it? No, we carry it forward.
But using road salt (a supply) and cages for people (capacity) are very different. If we’re going to stick with a road analogy, a more appropriate one is road capacity.
Induced demand is real. Adding lanes brings more traffic just because we have the space.
Sullivan and Kunkel both rightly point out that the county doesn’t have precise control over the jail population, which depends on other law enforcement departments, judges, prosecutors, state law and many other factors.
In complex systems like transportation planning and criminal justice, capacity pressures are part of what encourages the various players in the system to make the choices we want to move towards.
If our goal is zero, we would leverage the pressure jail capacity brings to incentivize and build new programs that are alternatives to incarceration, such as mediation, restoration and transformation. We hear that we are discounting victims when we stand against jails, but our current system doesn’t truly offer closure for many victims; what if we built something that could offer closure and repair at scale?
It Often Makes Sense to Rent
We hear that this extra capacity is about saving taxpayers money by reducing the cost transporting inmates to and from other facilities. These costs are not cheap. Woolard again:
As a result, the county has been housing inmates outside of Johnson County and has spent nearly $16 million doing so over the last 20 years. Though generally, the county is spending less and sending fewer inmates out of county each year. […]
Between 2021 and 2023, the county paid an average of $387,000 a year to house inmates out of county, according to county data.
In 2024 the county spent around $376,000 housing inmates out of county, averaging around 18.5 inmates housed of county per month, according to Sheriff’s office data.
Those numbers reflect housing costs and do not include the expense of staff time or transportation-related costs.
Additionally, the cost to house out of county is subject to change depending on the rates other facilities set.
Keep in mind that an up-to-$99 million jail also doesn’t include the expenses of staff time.
Meanwhile, Supervisor Jon Green wants to think about the next 50 years (“The number that I keep returning to is 2075 because I think we have a responsibility to put forth a facility that potentially could serve the county for five decades,” he said at that meeting).
It’s not as simple as saying the next 50 years would cost us a back-of-the-envelope $40 million in inmate transportation, but we could transport a lot of inmates for the $99,000,000 proposed for the jail.
Sometimes renting makes more sense than buying, especially if our goal is to reduce the number of people we’re incarcerating and with Johnson County’s trend line going down. One of the tenets of buying instead of renting is that you eventually get back money when you sell it, but we’re not selling this jail when we’re done.
If our goal is zero, we would prefer the temporary investment of transporting folks at the times the jail is over capacity and work toward ways to reduce the occurrence of those times.
We Must Fund Diversion
There’s also a disagreement around funding other public safety priorities, including the diversion efforts the initial Shive-Hattery report called necessary. The agreement on Thursday was to give the literal leftovers from a $99-million bond to affordable housing. Woolard:
While the board has discussed the role of social services and diversion measures throughout the process of working toward the future of the sheriff’s office and jail, Thursday’s work session was the first time the possibility of directing bond funds to affordable housing efforts has been brought up.
I don’t think this is a fair characterization. Diversion and social services have literally been at the center of this entire discussion.
We continue to hear that we’re doing diversion — and we are — but we don’t know what the ceiling is, and don’t seem to be particularly interested in finding it.
That’s a real shame.
If our goal is zero, we would start here — how do we get the most people out of cages — and then decide what we have left for our jail.
If our goal is zero, as it rightly should be, this whole exercise has been backwards, and until we approach this problem as one about rehabilitation and restoration and love, we will fail to solve it.
Aiming for zero isn’t optimism. It’s hope. Hope that victims can get real reparation for the harms they’ve faced. Hope that families can stay together. Hope that we invest in things that keep people safe. Hope that we can build systems centered on love instead of retribution. Hope that we stop investing in an inhumane system of state-sanctioned violence.
Someday.
- I don’t think calling the Shive-Hattery report a “needs assessment” properly frames it. The report isn’t a wish list, either, even though it includes one. I will refer to it as the Shive-Hattery report. ↩︎
