Boone County voters have rejected a three-eighths-cent sales tax for a new jail.
The new tax would have kicked in on Jan 1, 2027 and generated up to $255 million over 15 years. More than 300 beds would have been added to the county’s holding capacity.
The current jail has 245 beds but can only hold nearly 200 inmates. As a result, a large portion of detainees are being held in at least 14 other counties.
“We felt like we hit that tipping point,” Boone County Sheriff Dwayne Carey told KBIA before Election Day.
The county spent $2.5 million last year housing those detainees across the state, and Carey has said he only anticipated that figure to increase.
But instead of expanding the jail, the Columbia No New Jail Coalition argues county government should direct funding toward programs that help prevent incarceration in the first place.
Prop L opponents like John Amick, a volunteer with the Boone County Community Bail Fund and a member of No New Jail, have said the jail is a Band-Aid to the issue of overcrowding.
“Public safety and any kind of true accountability for interpersonal harm will come from strong communities with resources to thrive, not more cages and despair,” Amick wrote in a Columbia Missourian opinion piece.
No New Jail requested that the Prison Policy Initiative, a think tank, analyze data from the Boone County jail. The organization concluded that an increase in no-bond holds was likely behind the over-capacity inmate population.
Prison Policy Initiative found that the amount of people being held in the jail on no-bond holds had increased to more than half the population, up from the 29% of inmates being held on no-bond holds in 2022. They also found jail demographics like race and gender had remained the same over that same period.
