KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Local politicians gathered on March 19 to celebrate the completion of a gleaming new 470,000-square-foot human caging facility designed to hold up to 1,000 human beings, smiling broadly as they cut a ceremonial blue ribbon in front of the building where the region’s Black residents will be disproportionately stored for years to come.
The $317 million Jackson County Detention Center, which officials say came in under budget, features programmable toilets, LED lighting throughout, and a layout specifically engineered for what designers call “future expansion,” meaning the facility was deliberately built to accommodate even more human beings in cages as the need inevitably arises.
Research confirms that people released from incarceration are up to 40 times more likely to overdose than the general population in the two weeks following their release. People released from incarceration are 18 times more likely to commit suicide than those without a history of incarceration. – Prison Policy Initiative
“Having a building design with a forward-thinking focus is very exciting for our staff,” said Lucas Castilleja, Interim Director of the Jackson County Detention Center, apparently referring to the excitement of receiving an advanced new warehouse for people rather than, say, a school building with functioning heat.
Across town, Kansas City Public Schools students continue attending classes in buildings with $650 million in deferred maintenance, a backlog the district has accumulated over the nearly six decades it went without a single voter-approved bond. KCPS passed its first bond since 1967 only last year.
The $474 million measure, which required years of community organizing just to get on a ballot, was celebrated as historic. The new detention center, which cost two-thirds of that amount, required no such campaign. The County Legislature authorized it, financed it through existing reserves, bond sales, and federal pandemic relief funds, and it simply happened..
Meanwhile, the Missouri House passed a state budget this week that underfunds the K-12 foundation formula by $190 million and slashes $51 million in child care subsidies. For districts like KCPS, which spent decades fighting just to get a single bond measure on a ballot, the cuts land like a verdict.
Jackson County and Kansas City’s jail system incarcerates Black residents at staggering rates. One study found sixty-eight percent of people held before their court hearings and 71 percent of those held after are Black, despite Black residents comprising only about 27 percent of Kansas City’s population.
In Missouri overall, Black people are incarcerated at 3.7 times the rate of white people.
A 2023 analysis by the Prison Policy Initiative, conducted in collaboration with community organization Decarcerate KC, found that the majority of people in local custody are held for minor, nonviolent offenses and that the region does not actually need more jail beds.
But the facility has them anyway: 1,000 of them, up from 872 average daily inmates at the old location, with infrastructure sized to grow further. Officials praised this as foresight.
The project was led by JE Dunn Construction in partnership with DLR Group and a roster of subcontractors who will profit handsomely from a building designed to confine Black people.
Vance McMillan, Senior Vice President and Justice Group Leader at JE Dunn, said at the ribbon cutting that the project exceeded its supplier diversity goals, a detail offered without apparent irony at a facility that will overwhelmingly cage Black and brown people from neighborhoods where those same economic opportunities rarely materialize.
The facility reportedly includes on-site medical care, behavioral health services, education programs, and courtrooms, services that, if offered to residents before they were arrested, might have prevented many of them from ending up there at all.
Officials, including Vance McMillan, Senior Vice President and Justice Group Leader at JE Dunn Construction, described this as aligned with Jackson County’s “justice with dignity” vision, a phrase that manages to include both the word “justice” and the word “dignity” while describing a building specifically constructed to strip people of both.
At the time of publication, Hogan Preparatory Academy, a predominantly Black charter school in Kansas City, was still waiting on $9.3 million in bond-funded improvements, including HVAC and plumbing repairs. Several KCPS high school auditoriums continue to feature crumbling and broken seating. None of these facilities have programmable toilets.
