It’s good to see Douglas County officials taking the time to fully examine the complex issues involved in a proposed jail expansion.

The need for additional jail space is driven by a couple of factors: a rising inmate population and the need of many of those inmates for improved mental health care. Rather than simply investing in more space to accommodate larger numbers, officials are looking at ways to invest in services that better address the needs of inmates with mental illness. If they are successful, they may be able to move some of those inmates into treatment programs that don’t include incarceration.

Officials plan to spend about six months educating themselves about this issue. They are touring treatment facilities, meeting with potential partner agencies and analyzing data to see what other people are doing and what seems to work.

At this point, local officials are focusing on the idea of diverting inmates with mental health issues into a different kind of judicial process. Those inmates might be placed into a crisis intervention center as they await trial. Some of those nonviolent inmates might be able to avoid prosecution by instead being sentenced to a treatment program that would be overseen by the intervention center. Hopefully, that treatment would lead to a successful transition back into the community.

Having a large number of inmates with some level of mental illness in the Douglas County Jail is nothing new. Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center provides services to those inmates, which it estimates constitute about 35 percent of the jail population.

Douglas County officials have implemented a number of programs over the years to try to reduce those numbers, and it is to their credit that they are using the planning for a jail expansion as an opportunity to better address that need. Rather than focus entirely on how many square feet of space they need, they are looking at how whatever amount of money they ask taxpayers to commit to this project can be used to provide a better service to the community. Dare we say it’s the kind of process that taxpayers might have liked to see the city go through before putting a new police headquarters building on the ballot?

County officials say that changing the way people with mental illness are handled may or may not change the space needs at the jail or reduce the cost to taxpayers. Nonetheless, county officials are doing the kind of homework that should give county taxpayers more confidence that their dollars will be used to fund a real improvement not just in facilities, but in services as well.