By Emerson Cram, Iowa City
The decision by the Johnson County Board of Supervisors to purchase land and site a jail adjacent to the Historic Poor Farm is a profound rupture of trust and an insult to disabled people’s dignity and intrinsic value. For disabled communities, the historic poor farm is hallowed ground. The Board’s process bypasses affected communities connected to the site’s historic use, to construct an institution that actively disables and sickens inmates. To erect a jail on this site now would unearth a century of harm that the county has worked to heal.
The site’s history is critical to understand. Starting in 1855, poor and disabled people were confined here. This practice continued for over a century. Those “inmates” were forced to work, some locked in a cruel wooden asylum with openings in the cell to pass plates of food. Some are buried in an unmarked cemetery, long forgotten. Since roughly 2016, community members — including myself — have worked to honor their memory by interpreting the significance of this place of disability history. Our efforts are guided by lived experience with disability and illness, and an understanding that affected communities should have a meaningful and substantial role in planning decisions that would substantially alter the location’s purpose, feel, and relationships with our community.
To be disabled means that you understand the weight of the phrase “nothing about us without us.” That statement captures hard fought battles for self-determination in every sphere — housing, medical care, education access, economic rights. For close to a decade, I’ve researched the economic ideologies driving the evolution of social services, through perspectives of the farm’s asylum and surrounding land. The integrity of the landscape enables disability communities to tell their own story of the struggle for full civic and political rights, in Iowa and beyond.
The historic asylum is a reminder that disability and systems of incarceration share an overlapping history of forced confinement. When the asylum was built, what we call “mental illness” was not yet treated as a medical condition. Instead, persons accused of “insanity” were subject to legal processes that determined where they would go, without evidence that those institutions actually contributed to their well-being.
Disabled people are overrepresented in the criminal justice system. This is not, however, because of the so-called failures of deinstitutionalization, or the era starting in the 1960s when public awareness of gross human rights abuses inside of state-run institutions reached a fever pitch, culminating in the passage of the Community Mental Health Act of 1963. Painstaking historical research has also shown how mandates to fund community mental health centers were “funded to fail,” because subsequent administrations instilled deep cuts to mental health spending. Both Nixon and Reagan eviscerated the social safety net while doubling down on the “war on crime,” leading to exponential growth of prisons and jails across the United States.
Disability in the United States — its meaning and stigmatization — intersects with anti-Blackness in crucial ways, and carceral institutions are where those intersections are most damaging. This also means that poor farm asylums have an explicit though underlooked connection to race as a variable of criminalization. Early Iowa Code captures the differentiation of the poor based on the color line. In 1842, Chapter 118, the earliest of Iowa’s poor laws, explicitly stipulated the exclusion of anyone perceived as Black from accessing county relief. Poor laws served multiple functions, and regulated territorial residency and settlement. And even though Black freedom-seekers escaping enslavement found their way to and through Iowa, Black Codes made it significantly more difficult to settle and begin life anew. Counties believed those who were not Black had the capacity to be “rehabilitated” into productive citizenship through coerced work on a poor farm; those who were Black likely faced policing through vagrancy laws, in which they would be jailed or deported from the state. For the disabled, sentences also fell along the lines of the color line, distinguishing individuals between asylums, or prisons or jails, based on a bias of who could be “rehabilitated” to productive ends. Calls to honor disabled personhood emerge from ugly histories of segregation from public institutions including transit and education, coerced medical experiments and forced sterilization. Even a growing number of psychologists and psychiatrists have acknowledged how they have contributed to racial disparities of incarceration for those in crisis, exacerbating harm, and diminishing people’s life chances.
Why does this history matter now? On July 2, 2026, the Board signed a purchase agreement for the land that would later be identified for the jail, an act which departs from the norms of earlier bond efforts. Based on early 2000s newspaper coverage, land was not purchased, but selected from existing holdings, and multiple sites vetted during public meetings for their desirability and feasibility (“Group Picks Four Sites for New Jail,” Press-Citizen, July 21, 2000). Each time, the Board was transparent about land use. Different stakeholder communities spoke of concerns with a location proximate to the poor farm, which was, at that point, not the public-private investment it is today. Then-Iowa City Police Chief R.J. Winkelhake criticized the location, noting the added cost of transporting prisoners from downtown to the Melrose site, and the time exchange of transport for responding to crises elsewhere. Neighbors with young children, and those concerned about their property values also weighed in about their concerns.
Even now, when asked for clarity about the historical significance of the site next to the land purchased, the Board remains evasive. The press release promised “Future discussion about the site will take place during public meetings of the Board of Supervisors.” Except, nearly three months later with few weeks remaining before the election, that discussion about land use has not happened; at least, not in formal proceedings. But the site plan was referenced a week following the purchase agreement (July 9, 2026), when architects Shive Hattery updated their schematic floor plans during a meeting of the county’s primary jail decision making body. Later public documents all reference the newly purchased property as well.
The “yes” campaign insists that this is about a building, a construction project. Which also means it should be subject to planning processes required for any municipal bond funded, large infrastructural project, such as stakeholder analysis and environmental impact. Some board members belittle calls for “additional feedback,” noting that discussions have taken place for years in committee settings. But, this argument equates the volume of time on a topic with “feedback.” When I hear people say “we need to get community input and buy-in,” I hear them reference a different planning process. In contrast to “feedback” delivered in three-minute bites of unidirectional monologue to a group of people already determined in their actions, community buy-in actually references participatory decision-making. For some on the board, direct impact means those who work in the criminal justice system. I think everyone — no matter their position on the jail question — agrees that everyone deserves to work in the best conditions possible.
Calls for more expansive and participatory decision-making mean reconciling the parts of the criminal justice system that we see most often and what we don’t, and thus, largely take for granted. When people speak of systems, they are naming dynamics that go beyond the brick and mortar of a building. The expansiveness of criminal justice and the construction of criminality in the United States means impacted communities include those who have experienced incarceration in multiple forms and in different emotional or mental states, who can speak to that experience and its impact on personal and collective well-being; impacted communities include social workers on the front lines of keeping people out of carceral systems; nurses, educators, workers in food pantries, workers on suicide help-lines. Each of these come with profound impacts of secondary trauma, as they witness and support members of our community who often face insurmountable social abandonment.
I once believed the Board honored a commitment to confront how disabled and poor people have been treated at the hands of past supervisors, and that commitment was demonstrated in the dedication to build the Healing Trail. One supervisor once told me, the early experience encountering a group of disabled people touring the site’s historic asylum made an impression about how important that history was: “it made us realize that in order to truly honor the history of what happened there, face the history rather than try to sweep it under the rug and to begin a healing process that what happened on that property from that point forward needed to be positive, impactful, and as inclusive as possible.”
It feels impossible to reconcile that healing trail’s original purpose with the potential future of this land. To know why the pain runs so deeply, you have to consider the perspectives of disability history, and the imperative to educate each other about these experiences.
To build a jail here is to act as if you can unlearn what it means to recognize a person’s humanity.
Author-provided bio: Emerson Cram, Ph.D. is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where they conduct award-winning, peer reviewed research on the intersecting histories of disability and environment in the United States, including the Johnson County Historic Poor Farm. This research does not represent the views of the University of Iowa.
