Biden bucks to back the blue: Federal pandemic relief may fund county jail expansions in Iowa

At a Page County Board of Supervisors meeting this summer, officials were considering how to spend the $2.9 million in federal money coming to their southwest Iowa county, population just shy of 15,000 and dropping.

A new jail was on their wish list, but they figured they couldn’t spend COVID-19 relief funds on something like that.

It turns out almost anything goes under Uncle Joe’s big cash giveaway.

"I wish we could use these funds on new roads or bridges or building a new jail. Unfortunately, this relief funding does not cover that kind of item,” said Supervisor Alan Armstrong, as reported by KMAland radio reporter Ryan Matheny.

But it turns out almost anything goes under Uncle Joe’s big cash giveaway. Some of it in Iowa and elsewhere will go toward building jail cells and hiring more cops.

In March, Democrats in Congress passed and President Joe Biden the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act with the stated purpose of bolstering the country’s recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, including huge cash infusions to state and local governments this year and next. The broad scope of the law allows it to be used on a wide variety of projects.

There are few firm plans so far but jurisdictions in Iowa have discussed using the money to beef up their incarceration programs: Dividing a cell block in Des Moines County, a juvenile detention center in Scott County and a whopping $15.6 million for a new jail in Woodbury County.

In Johnson County, leaders are looking to spend $250,000 for a GPS tracking program for inmates, including hiring two additional deputies.

Johnson County Sheriff Brad Kunkel said the program would be focused on those accused or convicted of domestic violence. It could reduce the population housed in jail and allow people to keep working while they await trial.

To his knowledge, Kunkel’s would be the first agency in the state to offer pretrial GPS monitoring release. To do it, he’s requesting money for GPS monitors, software, a new vehicle and two full-time employees, which Kunkel told me would be “absorbed into future budgets.”

Domestic violence charges are an especially reprehensible set of crimes with a unique potential for reoffense, sometimes with deadly consequences. It’s hard to argue against a project that promises to keep victims safe. Nevertheless, we ought to be careful about piling more resources on top of the huge sum we already spend on law enforcement.

A few times during the Board of Supervisors’ many hours of discussions in the past several months, members cautioned against using the one-time federal money to hire personnel. Some priorities, they said, should be put off until the regular annual budgeting process. On hiring two new deputies, however, supervisors rarely had a word to say.

Law enforcement spending demands more scrutiny than other budget lines, not less. A law passed by legislative Republicans this year threatens severe penalties against local governments that reduce law enforcement spending. While the law so far is untested, cities and counties might be forever bound to the spending hikes they are funding with one-off revenue.

The American Rescue Plan Act allows for money to be spent on “congregate settings,” ostensibly because jails and other such facilities can be hotbeds for contagious disease. Yet if governments expand jail space and surveillance capabilities in pursuit of social distancing today, there’s probably nothing to stop them turning around and using those expansions to add jail capacity tomorrow.

The American Rescue Plan Act is Democrats’ version of trickle-down economics.

You can make a reasonable case that some law enforcement spending actually decreases incarceration and saves resources. But local law enforcement agencies in Iowa already have exorbitant budgets that always go up and never go down, often the biggest expenditure in city and county budgets, even the ones written by Democrats. This was true before lawmakers passed the “back the blue” law to outlaw defunding police.

If sheriffs and police chiefs have money-saving ideas, they should cover them with their existing allocations, not with COVID-19 funds. If their promises are true, the programs will end up paying for themselves.

The American Rescue Plan Act is Democrats’ version of trickle-down economics. They are flooding state and local governments with some $350 billion attached to easily manipulated strings and hoping maybe it will benefit the people who need it. For the tough-on-crime advocates and politicians on the blue team, an expanded incarceration state is just an added bonus.

(319) 339-3156; adam.sullivan@thegazette.com