The Problem of Jail Expansion and the Need for Solutions
Prison and jail expansion in Indiana and surrounding states is at crisis proportions. There are currently a range of plans to expand or build new prisons in the state under the guise that it is only way to solve the problem of overcrowding. In February, a number of organizations from Indiana and Kentucky joined together at the Indianapolis Liberation Center to highlight this growing problem and to highlight how they are working to address this issue.
Help not Handcuffs in Fort Wayne, Care not Cages in Bloomington, Critical Resistance in Kentucky, and IDOC Watch in Indianapolis came together to expose the reality of prison expansion and to propose alternative solutions to the problem of prison and jail overcrowding.
Many of these jail and prison expansion projects are the product of perceived progressive efforts at reform. Lawsuits by attorneys with the ACLU of Indiana focused on alleviating prison conditions have led to severe unintended consequences. The solution to prison overcrowding and poor conditions is not the building of new prisons or improved facilities. Instead, as the organizations discussed in February, we need alternatives to the mass criminalization and incarceration of fellow Hoosiers.
Federal officials have been working on a nearly $12 billion expansion of a new Westville Correctional Facility. In Fort Wayne, Jail expansion has been justified on grounds of overcrowding and a judicial order to build a new jail. Similar patterns emerge in Bloomington where a lawsuit has led to a campaign to build a new justice campus.
Indiana is not alone in this process. In Kentucky, a federal prison campaign to build a new Federal Correctional Institution (FCI) and prison camp in Letcher County is underway. In this case, prison expansion in the state has rested on the collapse of the coal industry and as a perceived solution to structural unemployment.
The new Westville Correctional Facility has been described as part of Indiana’s effort to shift incarceration from punishment to rehabilitation. Indiana Department of Corrections (IDOC) states that this new facility will include a dedicated mental health unit, dedicated classroom space for re-entry and post-incarceration employment, and 18,000 square feet of education space and expanded vocational training. However a new facility and bigger classrooms fail to address the underlying issue: Indiana is incarcerating Hoosiers and disappearing them into its massive correctional network.
The new Westville facility will replace both the old Westville Correctional Facility and Indiana State Prison, taking in most of the individuals incarcerated at the old facilities. However, IDOC Watch has received numerous complaints from families of those incarcerated at Indiana State Prison and the old Westville Correctional Facility reporting medical neglect, religious and racial discrimination, arbitrary punishment, and the withholding of both personal and legal mail. Both facilities have done little if anything to address any of the complaints from those incarcerated and their families, instead ignoring them despite the increasingly dire situation both inside the prisons and out.
New facilities, bigger classrooms, or solutions to economic restructuring all fail to address the underlying issue: Indiana is incarcerating Hoosiers and disappearing them into its massive correctional network. Expanding these jail and prison facilities will not improve the lives of those incarcerated, their families or the public. It is simply expanding one of the largest state correctional systems in the country to avoid addressing the underlying issues of mass criminalization and the reliance on prisons to disappear social inequalities.