By Richard Sullins | richard@rantnc

A report compiled by a Charlotte-based architectural firm laying out three options for modernizing the 30-year-old Lee County Jail was presented to the board of commissioners on May 31.

The document itself is only 25 pages long, but it’s clear that a lot of thought and deliberation are going to be required by county leaders over the next several months – and probably years – before any decisions are made on whether any of the options the report contains is the best choice for Lee County for the next several decades.

The findings of the seven-month study, conducted by Moseley Architects of Charlotte, will come as a surprise to few, and they are perhaps best summarized by four sentences contained in the document’s “Conclusions” section:

“The Lee County Jail operates within an aging building which does not have the infrastructure to meet the current building code requirements,” the report reads. “There are deficiencies in the mechanical systems. The security systems and equipment are old, outdated, and in need of an upgrade. The current booking and intake are insufficient to meet both current and future demand.”

How we got here

The commissioners voted last September to authorize a feasibility study that would look at the effectiveness, efficiency, structural integrity, security, and capacity requirements for the jail, which was built in the early 1990s. At that time, the county’s population was around 41,000. It’s around 66,000 today.

The facility was modern and sufficient by standards of the day when it was built, but time has taken a toll on the jail that is arguably worse than on any other facility the county owns. Today, its aging infrastructure frequently needs repair work. It suffers from overcrowding, outdated technologies, decreased space for intake and out-processing, and other issues seen at similar facilities across the state, including the smuggling of illegal drugs among inmates as inmates over the years have learned to exploit its weaknesses.

Space that was available for multiple purposes when the structure was built has slowly had to be claimed for other uses and the building has since lost much of the flexibility it had when it was new. The commissioners authorized the expenditure of about $200,000 last October to improve video camera coverage within the building as a stopgap measure to improve security until decisions could be made on what can be done within the foreseeable future to meet the county’s needs for a growing inmate population.

The current facility has space for about 125 inmates who are held in custody as they await trial or sentencing, as well a subset of inmates serving a sentence of up to two years. Its custody levels are a mixture of minimum, medium, and maximum, along with special housing units and a separate female dormitory.

The future is coming fast

Beyond looking at just the deficiencies of the current space, the report also included studies of the demographics of the county’s inmate populations over the past few years in order to create a baseline from which to project the numbers and types of beds that will be needed as Lee County continues to grow. Those numbers will help the commissioners identify trends to help forecast the jail’s future needs.

And those numbers are eye-popping.

Lee County’s jail has a maximum of 126 beds today. Since 2020, the number of persons being admitted to the facility has been increasing by about 75 individuals per year over each of the past five years.

More importantly, those same inmates are staying in the jail longer. The average length of stay for a Lee County inmate in 2018 was about 17 days. Last year, that number increased to just under 26 days, and it doesn’t take much math to see that more inmates staying for longer terms quickly creates a growing problem.

Jail populations vary from day to day. Just like industries or schools, they have their ups and downs. Lee County’s jail has been hitting its maximum capacity much more often in recent years, topping out at 126 inmates more frequently than ever before. That being the case, how is that going to look over the next 25 years or so as the county continues to grow?

The demographers who predict the future when it comes to population expect Lee County to grow to about 90,000 by 2050, or 24,000 people in 26 years. A population increase of that size could mean the average daily prison population in the county could grow to 300 or more in barely a quarter of a century.

Three options provided – plus a fourth

The needs assessment performed by Moseley provides projections on the number of inmate beds it believes will be needed in coming years, as well as preliminary concept designs for what each of the three options could look like and what they could roughly cost if they were built today.

The first option would expand the existing jail facility into the overflow parking area and add another 216 beds to the 125 that presently exist. The proposal would relocate the facility’s kitchen and renovate that space into a medical facility. A central “core” would be created to include the new kitchen, along with facilities for booking, intake, and laundry. The total estimated project budget for Option 1 is $67,539,040, which includes $1.8 million in funding to cover the costs of inflation during the construction phase

Option two would have the county purchase a 15-to-20-acre new site to construct an all-new jail and detention center that would house 304 additional inmates, but that could have the capacity to temporarily take in another 146, bringing it to a total capacity of 450 inmates. It also includes the capability of adding 96 additional male and 96 additional female beds in the future if the county chose to do so.

But option two has at least one major drawback. By keeping the sheriff’s offices at their current location near the county courthouse, many current functions would have to be duplicated and provided at each location, driving up costs of manpower, technology, and equipment. The estimated costs for option two start at just over $76 million, but that amount does not include the acquisition and purchase of land for the facility.

A third alternative proposes to remedy the shortcomings of option two by keeping the inmate populations together at one location as previously described and adding in the Sheriff’s Office and support agencies. Combining both functions in a single location would turn the site into a public safety facility, would eliminate the need to duplicate services at two locations, and make it easier for the sheriff to manage the day-to-day functions of his office.

This third layout would be essentially the same as the second – a radial concept of six housing units meeting at the center of an elevated control room – but with the addition of offices for the sheriff and his deputies, all at an estimated cost of just under $86 million.

There is also a fourth option, one that went unspoken in the report, and that is to do nothing at this time. Three seats on the board of commissioners are on the ballot this November – two of them Democratic and one Republican – and a case can be made for waiting until this new board is seated before any information is collected or evaluated.