Asheville – Buncombe County’s Director of Justice Services Tiffany Iheanacho shared with the commissioners a presentation entitled “Justice Innovations and Jail Population Management.” It provided what Chair Brownie Newman described as a “high-level” accounting of expenditures of funds from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation’s Safety + Justice Challenge. Funds are currently disbursed to 52 communities in 30 states to help them reduce their jail populations.
Buncombe received its first grant in 2016, and it used the $50,000 to “help monitor the growing number of defendants.” In 2018, the county received a $1.65 million award, which was renewed for $1.75 million in 2021. In the current year, the county received $1.1 million to sustain its work. Funds will cover the salary for an inclusion specialist ($189,154) and fund a racial equity workgroup ($40,000). Other budgeted expenditures include community engagement, a court navigator, an automated system for reminding people about court dates, a court navigator, assistance with driver’s license restoration, and jail diversion services.
The slides that followed required inside information for understanding. It was a typical PowerPoint with charts, acronyms, and names of organizations with nebulous, feel-good missions. Newman said the discussion would be very clear to those who served on the pertinent subcommittees. He agreed with the sentiment of the presentation but was at a loss for data with sufficient specificity to be actionable.
Following the presentation, Commissioner Parker Sloan said he had read in the newspapers that the Asheville Police Department (APD) had been “doing sweeps of downtown.” He asked, rhetorically, how that was working toward the county’s goals of reducing the jail population. Iheanacho said there was surely some impact, but because the charges were mostly low-level, people weren’t staying in jail long, if at all, as most were only being fined. She added that a change to state law requiring district courts to set bonds has caused a lot of people to overnight in jail, “changing the trajectory of the jail population.”
Commissioner Jasmine Beach-Ferrara reviewed the process, with all its delays. After waiting for several steps in the procedure, somebody could miss a court date. Then, they could be arrested and booked on fail-to-appear charges, and the process would repeat. “This cycle does not fit into our broad community efforts to safely reduce the jail population,” she said.
Commissioner Martin Moore echoed. The county could be helping somebody get back on their feet with multiple programs. He could move 90 yards down the line and then miss a court date, which would set him back to where he started with additional fees and county expenditures. Another common scenario, he said, was somebody getting help from the county to get their act together enough to rent a home, only to find his kids got involved in a street fight, which was a criterion for terminating his lease agreement. To reiterate, he said it was three steps forward, two steps back, and having to bankroll the next three steps forward. He wanted to know how his peers saw their role in “addressing what looks like a very weird use of our funds, trying to fix root causes, and respond to this in a way that is kind of thwarting our own efforts.”
Following an uncomfortable silence, Iheanacho recalled attending a recent conference and learning about a police chief who said his officers were arresting people caught with marijuana, and the district attorney was letting them go. Noting how the misaligned priorities were exhausting resources, the police chief then met with the district attorney to develop a joint strategic plan. This prompted Commissioner Amanda Edwards to ask, “How do we proceed if said partners who are not at the table continue not coming to the table?”
Beach-Ferrara said just one reason to be concerned was the inefficient use of public resources. To this end, Newman said the resources in question were not under the commissioners’ jurisdiction. Beach-Ferrara agreed but said the activities “quickly implicate resources under our jurisdiction.”
Edwards added that getting the city representatives to the table was not enough. She asked what the commissioners would do if leadership came to the table and refused to align their priorities with the county’s. At that, Commissioner Al Whitesides remarked, “Yeah, because we keep dancing around the same problem, and we all know who we’re talking about. What do we do? How do we get city council on board, or the city manager—whoever the APD is reporting to—because they continue to be the roadblock? I mean, it’s frustrating as h**k.”