“The problem is, it’s easier to give money to the corrections system—to the tune of one billion in the state of Virginia—than it is to take a couple of million dollars and provide inpatient treatment for our problem,” he railed, blaming politics and the tendency among jailers and sheriff’s departments to cling to bloated incarceration budgets championed during the War on Drugs, even though two hundred of the city jail’s eight hundred beds were typically empty. But Frederick Douglass had it right when he said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
