Lizette Valdes loves her east Kansas City neighborhood — where she grew up and where she’s raising a family — and she loves the view it provides of Kansas City from the playground in Blue Valley Park, about a mile away from her home.

But she worries how that view might change soon.

“I'm disappointed and mad that they want to put a jail where I grew up,” Valdes says, “where my family has been affected by the system.”

Through a thicket of barren trees closer to the edge of the park below, Valdes can already see construction efforts underway for Jackson County’s new detention center. If Kansas City voters pass ballot Question 1 on April 8 and renew a public safety sales tax, work on another new jail could begin right next to it.

“What am I showing my child, my 4-year-old child?” she asks. “Like, ‘hey, your mom is just trying to survive, but down the street there's going to be a new jail by the elementary school that you're gonna go to. That's the future that you're going to have.’”

“Nah, I don't want that,” Valdes said.

Kansas City voters first passed the public safety sales tax in 2002 and renewed it in 2010. It’s set to expire next year unless voters approve a second renewal, this time for 20 more years. City officials want to use a bulk of the money that would be collected to fund a new jail , which city leaders and police say is necessary to combat crime.

“This is not a mass incarceration, big state prison sort of thing,” Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas told KCUR about the effort. “This is something that says, ‘How can we do right by people?’ How can we do better, recognizing that we have concerns, we have property offenses, we have folks who are in abuse and assault situations, and we need to have somewhere where people go.”

But a group of local advocacy organizations — including Decarcerate KC, KC Tenants and Stand Up KC — want a different, more humane solution. Valdes has been organizing with Decarcerate KC to speak with voters about the public safety tax.

“Why build a jail there?” she asks. “When we walk outside, I want to see things that motivate us, empower us, that enrich us.”

Calls for a new city jail

Kansas City stopped running its own jail in 2015, and officials struck a deal to send city inmates to the Jackson County jail, just down the street from police department headquarters at the time. But that arrangement ended in 2019.

Plans for a new city jail have since failed to materialize, and people who break city laws are now either held at police patrol stations or sent to Vernon and Johnson County jails — 95 and 60 miles away from Kansas City, respectively.

News reports have also revealed Black men from Kansas City have suffered mistreatment and violence and experience inhumane conditions at the Vernon County jail.

“We're incarcerating people already,” said 2nd District council member Wes Rogers during a Council meeting in December. “And they're not getting, frankly, the quality of care they probably deserve, and that we can provide if that was here.”

Rising concerns over property crimes, car thefts , break-ins to small businesses , and gun violence — and where to put people charged with those crimes — have accelerated calls for a new city jail.

Lucas cited the number of people in municipal detention for assault and domestic violence.

“We have people on our streets right now who do need a time out,” Lucas said. “Those are people who, after they harm a partner of theirs, are just basically getting a ticket, and were told not to go back to bother the person or their family.”

The public safety sales tax currently brings in about $24 million each year, according to city finance officials. They estimate that figure will stay roughly the same if voters renew the tax, netting about $480 million over the next 20 years.

The city estimates it will cost about $250 million to build a new detention facility, and about $750 million to maintain and operate over its lifespan. City Council already committed $2.3 million to acquire the land from Jackson County.

The Kansas City Police Department also wants some of the money to pay for equipment upgrades and facility improvements, and City Council approved $16 million last year to build a temporary detention center at KCPD headquarters as a stopgap.

‘Churning them through our system’

A coalition of grassroots groups including Decarcerate KC, KC Tenants and Stand Up KC are organizing against renewal of the tax. They argue a new jail won’t effectively address crime and it is fiscally irresponsible to use tax money to fund one. They also say a sales tax is regressive, and would impact low-income people the most.

Johnathan Duncan, the city council’s only public opponent to the jail and renewing the public safety tax, cautions a city jail won’t directly address concerns about property crimes and gun violence. That’s because gun crimes, car thefts and most property crimes are largely state offenses.

“None of the perpetrators of those crimes will be housed in our city jail,” the 6th District council member said.

Research casts some doubt on the effectiveness of detention and incarceration, too. A study of Miami-Dade County in Florida found 20% of the jail population there each year is made up of people who have a mental illness, leading researchers to conclude that county jail is the state’s largest psychiatric institution.

The Prison Policy Initiative, a nonprofit organization studying the impacts of mass incarceration, analyzed the arguments for a new Kansas City jail. Their report found municipal jail beds were mostly used for short lengths of time “that destabilize people’s lives without providing any public safety benefit.”

The same report found one-third of people in Kansas City jails from March to December 2019 were booked for a violent crime. The other two-thirds were there for charges like theft, vandalism, disorderly conduct or missing court. The majority of people in municipal jail had not been convicted of a crime and were awaiting trial.

A 2022 report from Kansas City Municipal Court on the need for a municipal detention and rehabilitation center found most defendants in city lockup have a mental illness or substance use disorder. That report said putting them in a detention center “provides a period of time for stabilization before court appearance.”

Duncan doesn’t think that’s the answer.

“Churning them through our system and then spitting them back out again to repeat the process is costly and inhumane and doesn't actually address the root cause of the problem,” he said.

‘Exploit us and our children’

Pateisha Royal, a member of Decarcerate KC who is organizing against the public safety sales tax, says she’s frustrated city officials want to use her tax money on a jail.

“We know that the jail impacts the working class, poor individuals, and brown and Black individuals,” Royal said. “It's impacting not only us now, but also our future generation. And so I think it would continue to exploit us and our children.”

Instead, Royal supports the building of a community resource center. That way, she says, the city would benefit more from investments in health care, jobs training and local grocery stores.

Council members are exploring the creation of a community resource center as an alternative to incarceration. City Council recently passed a resolution directing the city manager to issue a request for proposal for a community resource center.

According to the resolution, such a facility would be run by community-based service providers and offer care to people experiencing mental illness, substance abuse disorders and homelessness.

“When you think about the Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it's housing, it's food, it's clothing, it's shelter — these are the things that we need,” she said. “Because when you think about people that get incarcerated, they are out trying to survive. They have no means of living.”