(Co-authored with Jack Norton for the Vera Institute of Justice)

In California’s Central Valley, as in many rural places and small cities across the country, counties have been investing in expanded local carceral infrastructure—bigger jails to facilitate rising incarceration. And county jail construction, like the state’s prison boom, has been a state-led project. In most states, jail construction costs are paid for by the counties, but in California, jail construction is heavily subsidized by the state. The state has given its counties $4 billion to build or expand local jails since 1983, funding that has increased the ability to incarcerate at the local level in the face of both statewide opposition to prison construction and local opposition to jail expansion. The state has been subsidizing new county jails that are, in many cases, assumed to be improved because they are new. As John Prince, director of county jail construction for the Board of State and Community Corrections said, “It’s not [just] about building more beds; in this case, it’s about building more, better beds.”

In 1978, after California voters approved Proposition 13, which put a stringent cap on property taxes and limited local capacity to issue government debt, county officials were unable to easily finance capital infrastructure. Elected officials, led by State Senator Robert Presley, a former Riverside County sheriff’s deputy, devised a solution: a series of legislative ballot measures to authorize state general obligation bonds to fund local infrastructure. The first of these was put on the general election ballot in 1982 and raised $500 million for public schools and $280 million for local jails. In total, statewide ballot measures set aside $1.5 billion for county jail construction in the 1980s—$4.5 billion in today’s dollars. According to a 1996 Board of Corrections report to the legislature on the jail construction fund, the program was responsible for a 123 percent increase in county jail capacity, from 31,824 to 70,858. A subsequent state legislative program from 2007 to present has dedicated $2.5 billion to build county jail capacity across the state to hold 14,939 people.

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