Progressive advocates for abolishing jails argue that incarceration has particularly grievous effects on the mentally ill. As one rallying cry puts it: “You can’t get well in a cell.” Officials in Franklin County, Ohio, reject this view. They built the new James A. Karnes Corrections Center with special regard for mentally ill inmates. The county has put hundreds of millions of dollars behind its commitment to release jail inmates in better health than when they were admitted.
Franklin County is home to Columbus, Ohio’s capital and largest city. The Columbus region is prosperous, especially by Rust Belt standards. Violent crime has fallen citywide since its mid-1990s peak but remains a concern. At the Ohio county level, Franklin’s property-crime and crime-against-persons rates ranked first and seventh, respectively, among those counties for which data were available in the most recent report.
Franklin County’s old downtown jail opened around 1970. A second, larger facility—Jackson Pike—opened in the mid-1980s. Discussions about replacing the old system began in the early 2000s, prompted by an overcrowding crisis that the federal Department of Justice criticized as one of the nation’s worst. As many as 2,700 inmates were then held in custody, in a system built for slightly more than 2,300.The overcrowding eased during the late 2000s, when concerns shifted to the county’s mentally ill inmates. Sheriff’s Office staff, lacking hard data, believed that mental-health-related problems were increasing in their jails. That perception was substantiated in a 2015 analysis of Franklin County’s correctional mental-health crisis, conducted under the auspices of the Stepping Up Initiative—a partnership between the National Association of Counties, the American Psychiatric Foundation, and the Council of State Governments’ Justice Center. The report found that the county’s seriously mentally ill inmates stayed in jail, on average, over 50 percent longer than other inmates, and recorded an almost 20 percent higher recidivism rate.
The grim situation depicted in the Stepping Up report is representative of the mental-health crisis facing American correctional systems. Throughout the late twentieth century, Ohio and other states scaled back their psychiatric asylum programs. In effect, state governments shifted costs to counties. County jails now host, cumulatively, over 100,000 seriously mentally ill individuals, who, in a previous era, would have been committed to long-term asylum care. This arrangement is dysfunctional. Counties, especially in rural areas, are often too poor to make the necessary investments in correctional health care and lack specialized medical professionals to care for seriously mentally ill inmates.
But AAA-rated Franklin County is better fiscally positioned than most localities to manage these challenges. Its $360 million jail project, breaking ground in November 2017 and dedicated in July 2022, is the largest infrastructure project the county has ever undertaken. Named for the longest-serving sheriff in Franklin County history, the new corrections center was built in two phases, the second focused on female inmates. Though the county has closed the downtown jail, Jackson Pike, the larger legacy facility, remains in operation and confines about 1,160 male inmates. Jackson Pike will likely stay open for years.
Franklin County has yet to decide how many beds it wants in its correctional system. Officials had originally intended to expand capacity from 2,330 to as much as 3,000, butPhases I and II of the new Karnes center together have only about 1,300 beds. The county’s criminal-justice planning board believes that the county needs less jail capacity than in the past, citing long-term crime declines and a growing commitment to diversion and incarceration alternatives, particularly for mentally ill offenders. The resulting downsizing has been less drastic than, say, New York City’s. Between 2012 and 2022, violent crime in Columbus fell 15 percent, and the census in the Franklin County jail fell 12 percent; in New York City, violent crime went up 16 percent, while the jail census fell 55 percent.
As county officials debate the system’s capacity, correctional leadership is changing operations. The new facility will allow for “direct supervision,” a strategy that seeks to break down social barriers between deputies and inmates. Just as community policing takes cops out of their patrol vehicles, direct supervision embeds deputies in pods with inmates. The new jail’s two-tiered pods, each housing about 50 inmates, are the facility’s core building block, with cells arranged around what looks like a big living room. One could envision a sitcom set there. The pods have their own washers and dryers, plus recreation and programming space. One key operational advantage of direct supervision is that it maximizes the amount of programming that can happen onsite, in the pod, instead of elsewhere in the facility, with the attendant need to escort inmates from their locked cells.
Sheriff’s Office leadership is keen on “biophilic” design principles—the use of high ceilings, murals of ocean and mountain scenes, and, especially, maximum natural light. (The county purposely put its mental-health pods on the second floor to access skylights.) This collectively gives the new jail a less-institutional feel. Other notable design features meant to impart a more “normalized” ambience include wood graining, TVs requiring headphones (which cuts down heavily on noise), and clocks. According to Chief Deputy Geoffrey Stobart, inmates in other jails commonly ask the time of day. “Jails don’t have clocks,” he says. “It’s not normal not to know what time it is.”
While it remains to be seen whether any of these touches will push down recidivism, the jail deputies appreciate the improved design. Recruiting people to work “behind the wall” is a challenge everywhere. Franklin County officials feel strongly that offering employees something other than the unremittingly hard, gray, and bleak workplace of other jails has helped with staff recruitment and retention.
The new Franklin County facility brings with it several updates to the county’s correctional health-care system. First, Franklin changed its health-services vendor, expanding that investment by over one-third. The annual bill for correctional health now exceeds $20 million. Second, the new jail features a medically managed withdrawal pod for inmates suffering from opioid addiction, a scourge that has ravaged central Ohio. Third, the jail’s mental-health housing is arranged in a continuum. For the most seriously mentally ill, who must be separated for their sake and that of other inmates, there is the Acute Mental Health pod, one wing of which holds inmates in isolation, while the other (which those in isolation can see) affords more freedom and out-of-cell time. A Non-Acute Mental Health pod, meantime, resembles the general population pods. Explains Chief Deputy Stobart, “What we’re trying to do is to get them some treatment and get them med compliant and transition them into smaller group housing areas where they can begin to interact with more folks, and as they do better in that space we graduate them to an even bigger space, where they’ll be interacting with more people and start to live in a more normative environment.” Moving up the continuum means more freedom.
This holds true in the general population as well. The inmates in one such pod I visited were predominantly facing serious charges for violent offenses but were not mentally ill. They spent almost the entire day out of their cells, save at night and an hour in the afternoon.
Nationwide, the threat of litigation hovers over correctional policy. But Franklin County was not sued into making its recent changes. Franklin is blue by Ohio standards—it’s one of only seven Ohio counties that Joe Biden won in 2020—but jail abolitionists are not as influential here as elsewhere. “There was one guy that would come to commissioner meetings every time we talked about the new jail,” says Marilyn Brown, a former member of the Board of Commissioners extensively involved in the planning. “He didn’t want a jail. That was it. One guy.”
Like any community, Franklin County will assess its needs for future jail capacity on criminal-justice policy and underlying crime trends. Neither of those variables is wholly predictable. Homicides more than doubled in Columbus between 2019 and 2021, and last year saw the third-most homicides in city history. And Ohio recently strengthened penalties for domestic violence, which could expand the need for detention beds.
Even if crime generally is down compared with 30 years ago, and blue and red jurisdictions increasingly prefer diversion and other social service-type approaches to incarceration, now is an opportune time for governments to invest in jails. The classic tension in infrastructure management—between expansion and maintenance—is less acute in the criminal-justice-reform era. Nationwide, the jail population grew close to 400 percent between 1980 and the end of the 2000s; it has since dropped about 15 percent, and prison populations have trended similarly. As populations decline, counties will be better equipped to address aging facilities. According to the Pew Charitable Trusts, about one-third of jail capacity nationwide is more than 30 years old, and “jail infrastructure can degrade substantially after 30 to 40 years of wear and tear.”
From a mental-health perspective, investing in jails matters for both long- and short-staying inmates, if in different ways. Franklin County now incarcerates fewer misdemeanants, but about 70 percent of inmates still leave within three days. For short-stayers, officials aim at facilitating connections with community providers. Franklin County achieves this through its Rapid Resource Center, which every inmate must pass through upon exiting the jail.
Long-stayers have greater needs. Nationwide, with criminal-justice reforms leading to the incarceration of fewer non-serious offenders, the average lengths of stay in jail rose about one-third between 2015 and 2022. With more long-stayers facing more serious charges, jails must offer more health, social, and recreational services, creating pressure for newly designed spaces. Deputies don’t like extended stretches of idleness, and better design can facilitate more activity.
Building a new jail is an expensive proposition. Anyone pushing for better conditions risks getting caught between the pincers of fiscal conservatives and progressive activists, the same coalition that, decades ago, set in motion the deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Many communities may lack basic fiscal capacity, and state governments will have to engage. Notably, Ohio governor Mike DeWine has made resources available to counties to reinvest in local jails, though Franklin County didn’t use this assistance.
Franklin County illustrates how decarceration can be managed more responsibly than was deinstitutionalization. Its system, once best known for crisis-level overcrowding, is now renowned as a model for the care and treatment of seriously mentally ill jail inmates. Already, the county has hosted hundreds of visitors from around the U.S. to see the new facility. No one who has visited Franklin County’s James A. Karnes Center, and a facility like Los Angeles’s Men’s Central Jail, could possibly maintain the old fiction that “all jails are the same.”
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