Smith County Officials Still Don’t Get it!

• Smith Jail Bond: Open Invitation For Comments Pro and Con
• Education Now, Or Incarceration Later!
• What I Believe About Government, and a few other things
• Felonies Involving Oysters? | 1 0f 21 Adults “In the system”
• Smith County Schools or Jails | School Bond vs. Jail Bond

Smith County Schools or Jails | School Bond vs. Jail Bond

Vote Yes For The New Smith County Jail Proposal!

Smith Commissioner Fleming | Well Bless Her Heart…

Another local paper article on Smith County Jail overcrowding and officials response to state legislation allowing for the ticketing of some misdemeanors in place of incarceration has come to my attention.

In short, officials just don’t seem to want to alleviate the overcrowding situation, even when handed the solution in writing, and signed by the Governor! The stated issue seems to be that no one has told them how to do it! Surely someone in officialdom, can come up with a method!

If jail overcrowding is the big problem, and it is, then solving a few minor problems to get the solution should be something they are willing to do. Perhaps they are afraid that this might work, and then all the plans for jailzilla would just plain look silly. It might make the public wonder why so much taxpayer money was spent trying to get something that we don’t even need!

Officials in Tyler and Smith county need to wake up! Proposing a new jail plan in May will look ridiculous if the alternatives are not given a chance to work. County commissioners have already ditched the funding for a program put in place by our judges, and now the D.A. has trashed the efforts of our legislators by refusing to even give the new plan a try! If you think the public was hacked off about commissioners giving themselves raises before the last bond fiasco, wait till you see what happens in the next one!

The following is an older post on the same issue. It was regurgitated from the old blog. County officials might do well to ruminate on it.

Posted by ajeffersonian at 12/9/2007
Smith County Officials Still Don’t Get It!
It has once again become apparent that Smith county officials don’t get it! There has been some talk about tweaking the jail proposal for the May 2008 election, possibly offering a “build it in stages” type plan for the voters.

This is becoming a regular event in Smith county, and the poll results get more lopsided each time it is presented, and still the supporters continue down the same road.

What Jailzilla supporters and the media seem to missing, is the fact that it does not matter how far or how fast they travel down this road, or how doggedly and repeatedly they do so, it is still the wrong road. There are a lot of comments from officials. There are a lot of stories quoting the officials, what is lacking is input from the people who actually walk into the voting booths! It smacks of official arrogance!

The people of Smith county will not say yes to any jail until something is done to lower the incarceration rates! The fact that this is not the main issue in the public domain has at least two causes:

1. The media has not made this part of the issue an area of focus.
2. People don’t want to talk about it in public for fear of being branded “liberals” or “bleeding hearts,” or for fear of harassment.

There will have to be some trust built before the public will even be willing to talk about it! Sure, people will talk around the issue, they will talk about ill timed raises, or jail cost, but the real reasons stay hidden under a cloud of distrust.

The big issue then, becomes the issue of trust. Why it is missing, and how to regain it should become the focus. That is the first step. Whether anyone can see this, or will take any positive action on it, is anyones guess.

Smith County Commissioners: People Despise Arrogance

• Smith Jail Bond: Open Invitation For Comments Pro and Con
• Education Now, Or Incarceration Later!
• What I Believe About Government, and a few other things
• Felonies Involving Oysters? | 1 0f 21 Adults “In the system”
• Smith County Schools or Jails | School Bond vs. Jail Bond

This article was posted on the old blog, and I wanted to bring it along to the new one. A little background might help. Commissioners in Tyler, Smith county Texas have made a couple of proposals for building a new jail in Tyler Texas, the county seat of Smith County Texas. It looks as though it might become an annual event! Both of these proposals were shot down by Smith county voters, the last, by a 70 to 30 margin!

The local newspaper carried the story quoted in this article.

Not only did the commissioners bulldoze forward with a proposal that clearly lacked public support, but they gave themselves a nice pay raise prior to the election! What has become clear to most of the folks I have spoken with on the issue, is that they want their public officials to back off, and start over from scratch. They want commissioners to ask themselves if a new jail is needed at all, instead of assuming that it is.

This is a valid question in a county that incarcerates more than 50% more of it’s citizens than the state average, in a state that incarcerates 44% more than the national average! There are other means at the disposal of the county for dealing with overcrowding. They could:

1. Stop arresting people for ticket-able offenses.

2. Streamline the system to get pre-trial detainees through the system more quickly.

3. Stop incarcerating child support violators. There are other means of handling this already in place. I will give you more on that with more details penned by Judge Carole Clark in an upcoming update.

These 3 things, taken together, would eliminate overcrowding in the current Smith county facility. Why are they not being done?

Anyway, that should get us up to speed. The original article is bellow:

Note To Smith County Commissioners: People Despise Arrogance in Public Officials!

“Smith Voters Send Clear Messages On Jail Proposal” is what the editorial in the Tyler Morning Telegraph said, but the message is apparently not clear enough for the officials still pushing the idea of a new jail in the next election! The editorial lists three causes: Price, location, and pay raises. It also touched on what I think is a more probable cause.

“We also believe that voters resented the choice made by Smith County commissioners to limit public dialogue.

The message voters received from commissioners, in the format of the town meetings, was “We don’t trust you.” The court’s reasoning behind the format – that naysayers would take up too much time – was flimsy and unconvincing.” Flimsy and unconvincing? No, just downright arrogant!

The naysayers had their say at the voting booth. It was a big horse laugh, and a slap in the face of official arrogance! The message sent back to the commissioners from the naysayers was: We don’t trust you, either, and we are willing to go to the polling places to prove it! The naysayers had the final say!

Well folks, it is time to start looking at what the naysayers say! It is about time for some rethinking. What commissioners should be looking at is alternatives to a new jail! Don’t see what you can salvage from previous attempts, go back to square one. Ask the questions: “Are the voters right? Do we really need a new jail, or should we look at slowing down the rate of incarceration before we propose to tax the people to penury?”

Stop assuming that we even need a new jail. Start thinking outside the cell. The automatic assumption that because we have a problem with overcrowding, we need to build a new inmate warehouse, is a logical fallacy. If you owned a warehouse, and couldn’t process the goods fast enough, you would probably look at speeding up the process before you started thinking of building a new warehouse. Let’s do the same here.

Ask for public input. The sort of vague, quasi sincere requests for input in the past will not get any real information from the public. It would also be good to allow an anonymous forum for those who might otherwise be too timid to submit suggestions. There is a lot of distrust which apparently has gone unrecognized by county officials.

The last proposal had almost no public input. This was seen as arrogance by most people, and people despise arrogance in public officials.