edit: It’s worth noting that I did not vote for what’s below because, after recently moving, my residency is still in another county in my state. I still voted, but not for the vote I’m about to talk about.

There’s a vote in my town for a new jail. It’s very hotly contentious. The current jail is pretty much universally recognized as crumbling and out of date and overfilled with inmates so I don’t think many people argue about that kind of thing. There was an expose posted in the local newspaper a year ago with photos of the thing. Most rooms had upwards of 6 - 12 people in them, and the former “games room” of the jail was now a living space for 30 inmates. There’s pictures of black mold and crusty toilets and shit like that. The elevator also doesn’t work, period. Proponents of the jail are pro new infrastructure of course. People anti jail are split up into like 3 camps that seem to spread throughout party lines. Some are anti jail tax (there are even signs saying the 10th of a percent sales tax increase will lead to “financial ruin.”), some are anti this specific jail saying it’s the wrong location etc., I think the rest are anti literally all jails in particular. What I find interesting is a lot of the anti jail tax people seem to be progressive teens which is really odd to me. They canvas support a lot in the local university. I always thought the anti tax folks were the libertarians. I know taxes suck but I think the pragmatic way of looking at it is that it’s really the only good way we have of getting things done in the society we currently live in, especially when it comes to infrastructure.

What I will say is that the “say no to the jail” people are very in your face about it. Lots of botting on the local subreddit, lots of downvote spamming there too. Very toxic from my experience, although I think the toxic ones are more the anti tax people than anybody else. I have yet to see very many pro jail people who are very active about it. Just lots of passive support for that. It’ll be interesting to see what the results will be but I think that a lot of people will be mad in the end.

I only just moved here so I don’t think my opinion has a lot of weight, but data shows that the city boomed in the past few decades in terms of population. IIRC it doubled in the last 20 years alone despite almost 100 of history. So I’ve been personally looking at it as a “now or never” type of deal.

People have definitely mentioned that we should be incarcerating less, and I think I agree with that. However, knowing how long politics take, I do worry for the folks who will be stuck in there until we can pass measures to free up space in the current jail. The mold problems and straight up broken elevator though? I think that requires a bit more work.****