Hal Taylor couldn’t be any more direct when asked if Monroe County should build a new jail. “No,” the 89-year-old prison-reform advocate answered during an interview in his jailhouse office.

In his duties with New Leaf, New Life, a nonprofit organization that injects a dose of therapeutic justice into the county’s reluctant criminal justice system, Taylor and colleagues like Tania Karnofsky speak face-to-face with 40 to 50 nonviolent inmates each week.

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Second in a series

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The jail, designed for 126 prisoners but which housed 334 on Sept. 21, is full of people who do not belong there, they say. Building a new jail would simply perpetuate a broken system.

“If we have a new jail,” Taylor said, “all the problems that are causing this jail to be overflowing would cause the next jail to be overflowing in another month after they got the new jail in. We’ve got to have real reform.”

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Related story: Stoops, Thomas offer alternatives to new jail

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New Leaf, New Life evolved out of the Citizens for Effective Justice group that came to prominence in the wake of the November 2006 inmate death on the jail floor. The man, James Borden, was not taking prescribed medications and died after being repeatedly electro-shocked by jailers with a Taser.

Taylor said the most important New Leaf component is a residential treatment program for those with alcohol and substance problems.

"I could document person after person after person who is in this jail for essentially no real reason at all."
- Rev. Hal Taylor

A “snapshot” of the jail population on June 7, 2007, showed that 70 percent of the 251 inmates that day had pending and prior offenses for drugs and alcohol.

Karnofsky acknowledged that many of those inmates also committed other crimes. But most of those, theft in particular, are directly related to the illegal nature of drugs and are not the consequences of drug-induced behavior.

She and Taylor agree that if society effectively addressed the problems of drug and alcohol addiction and abuse, there would be no discussion of building a new jail.

“We wouldn’t have any kind of population problem,” Karnofsky said.

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Inside the jail, New Leaf practices what it preaches with respect to drug addiction. The residential program provides all-day treatment to a block of 14 inmates.

“That’s the single most important thing we do,” Taylor said.

New Leaf also offers “intake” classes for up to 15 inmates a day, Taylor said. The instructors discuss subjects such as what to expect in jail, anger management, self understanding and motivation.

“Essentially, it’s a therapeutic program designed to help them

gain in personal maturity,” he said.

An ordained Episcopal minister with a doctorate in psychology from IU, Taylor said New Leaf is not a faith-based program.

“We don’t tell them what is right,” he said. “Our goal is to make them think.”

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To illustrate his point that the system is broken at the police level, Taylor told the story of a young, barefoot man he had just met at the Shalom Community Center a few days before the interview. Shalom is a nonprofit that provides services to the homeless.

An acquaintance knew the man needed shoes and gave him a pair, Taylor said. He was sitting in Seminary Square Park at Second and Walnut streets when a police officer approached with a woman by his side. She pointed to the man’s shoes and said they belonged to her store.

The officer arrested the man and brought him to jail, where, Taylor said, he must have spent seven to 10 days, “because that’s about the least amount of time you can be in here.”

The June 2007 study showed that 99 inmates -- 40 percent of the population -- were in jail awaiting court hearings.

The authorities ultimately determined that the shoes were purchased by someone else with a lost or stolen credit card, and the man was not charged.

“They didn’t need to bring this guy in,” Taylor said. “I could document person after person after person who is in this jail for essentially no real reason at all.”

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The June 2007 snapshot underscores another aspect of the criminal justice system that Taylor and Karnofsky say is badly broken -- probation.

"They get out and live it up. And then they go back to jail. It’s a culture."
- Tania Karnofsky

Eighty-seven prisoners -- 35 percent of the total -- were on “probation hold,” which means they had violated terms of their probations from prior cases and were arrested.

Of those, 34 were imprisoned for technical violations -- like missing a probation meeting or hearing or failing a drug or alcohol test, for example -- not because they had committed another crime.

“Probation isn’t worth a hoot in hell,” Taylor said. “If it was worth something, we wouldn’t have this kind of recidivism.”

Karnofsky said many probationary terms are self-defeating, like the requirement that probationers cannot drink when their legal problems have nothing to do with alcohol.

“People say, ‘I’ll be all right until the family reunion or the Fourth of July picnic,’” she said.

Taylor said probation essentially dictates that these men and women restructure their lives according to a “strange set of rules” that effectively say they must disassociate with everyone they know.

“People can’t do that,” he said. “Who are they going to hang out with?”

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Police and probation aren’t the only systemic problems that lead to jail overcrowding, Taylor and Karnofsky said.

"If you’ve got money in this community, you don’t come to this jail."
- Rev. Hal Taylor

The county judges, some of whom are overly punitive in their approaches, require most inmates charged with crimes to post cash bonds that they cannot afford, Taylor said.

“They would be just as well on the streets as they are here, but they can’t afford the bail,” he said. “When it comes down to it, and they’re slapped in jail, there’s no money there to bail them out.”

The county prosecutor’s office is primarily interested in feeding the system, he said.

“I think we have to have real reform among the prosecutors,” he said. “… Their jobs are part and parcel of all this. The more we prosecute means the better job we’re doing.”

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Social ills, such as broken families, an inferior educational system, failing economic opportunities and the criminal culture all contribute to the high prison population in Monroe County and the United States, Taylor and Karnofsky said.

Taylor said he met a 19-year-old high school dropout recently who had five children with three different women.

“Tell me what the family life is for those kids and that guy,” he said. “Can we call that a family?”

While the man is by no means typical, his situation is not isolated, Taylor said.

Karnofsky said jail is the dominant culture for many of the inmates, most of whom have no real incentive to stay out.

“They get out and live it up,” she said. “And then they go back to jail. It’s a culture.”

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Overarching the entire problem, Taylor said, is the refusal by the Bloomington community to even discuss, never mind embrace, reformative justice.

“Nobody but nobody is really interested in helping these guys turn around,” he said. “We haven’t been able to raise the question of therapeutic justice in this town, at all. They’re all in it to punish people by god the way they ought to be punished.”

The point, Taylor said, is that the community doesn’t see the jail issue as a matter of fairness.

“And in my view it is very unfair,” he said. “If you’ve got money in this community, you don’t come to this jail. You don’t come here. And if you do come to this jail and you’ve got money, you get the kind of lawyer who will get you out and get you out with no problems.

“But if you don’t have any money and you come in here, then this system finds a way to get you back over and over again. The system is its own damned enemy. “

Steven Higgs can be reached at editor@BloomingtonAlternative.com.