Kootenai County has a serious jail overcrowding problem. It's bad enough that we ship people awaiting trial to other counties. One of the issues in the last election was this problem. And the real reason we have this problem is that in Kootenai County, jail has become the default punishment for everything. We throw minors who get caught smoking cigarettes in jail for three days. We have a very popular crime here: possession of drug paraphernalia with intent to use. That gets you ten days. Every single thing that you can possibly throw someone in jail for, they automatically throw you in jail for doing. I'm pretty sure they'd punish running red lights with jail time if they could.
There was a Libertarian running for sheriff who dropped out of the race very early; his idea for solving the jail overcrowding problem was to explore non-jail approaches to criminal justice...you know, things like probation. (This should be obvious to anyone - quit throwing the "possession of paraphernalia" criminals in the slam and you might have enough room for serious criminals like the city council and the school board.) After he was exposed for wanting to let rapists and heroin pushers walk the streets (more like let the minors who get busted for cigarette smoking walk the streets, right?) he dropped out of the race. Ben Wolfinger, who won the election, said he would look into allowing a private contractor to build a bigger jail. (He's a Republican. What do you expect?) The two challengers both said the perfect way to solve the problem was to build an Arpaio-style tent jail. Wolfinger pointed out the realities of building a tent jail in Idaho, mainly the white shit that falls out of the sky three months out of the year, the extra guards required, the escapes, the fact that Arpaio's tent gulag is one of the most expensive county jails per prisoner in America...
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