BROOKINGS – People came to learn and ask questions during Thursday’s open house regarding the planned Brookings County Detention Center expansion.
The gathering, consisting of residents who live near the jail and interested members of the broader public, had the chance to tour the jail to see firsthand the issues jail staff deal with every day. Afterward, architect firm BKV Group led a short presentation summarizing the basics of the project, focusing on the layout of the structure and the way it addresses current issues as well as the physical appearance of the facility.
The build itself is anticipated to cost $8.4 million, not including accompanying fees, which add a significant amount to the total costs. The final price tag could be as much as $11 million.
But it’s in service to expanding a jail that can’t keep up with current staff and inmate needs. With a capacity of 54, they averaged 40 inmates being housed in the jail daily in 2016. In the first 60 days of 2017, that daily average is up to 47.8.
Although that appears to be a large leap, that increase began in August 2016 and isn’t well reflected in a yearly average. At the moment, the jail is housing 33 inmates, 30 who are in for felonies.
These numbers came as a surprise for many during the tours prior to the presentation, said Bart Sweebe, jail administrator.
“I quizzed every tour group I took through tonight and said we’ve X amount in here; how many do you think are in on felonies? Oh, seven, eight, 16. You can double that number because we’ve actually got 30.”
A lot of felons
Beyond the uptick in daily jail population, even more problematic is the high number of felons within that total population. Because of the nature of different inmates’ felonies, they can’t always be housed together, and determining who can be placed where during their stay is a bit of a puzzle.
“We are not set up for that. Our misdemeanors are in with our felons, lower-grade felons. We don’t put them in with the hard core. It’s not the idea situation. Out of our felony crowd, most of them are in on assaults,” Sweebe said.
As DuWayne Jones, managing architect at BKV Group, told those gathered, there’s a lack of many modern features of a jail in the current facility: no kitchen, dedicated space for booking inmates, medical area, interview space for attorneys, clergy and mental health workers, and an undersized laundry area.
Construction would occur in phases so as to keep the daily operations at the jail as uninterrupted as possible throughout the process. They’d first build the addition, then work to remodel space that’s in the current jail facility.
What will it look like?
After the brief presentation, members of the public could ask questions of BKV; most questions had to do with the aesthetics of the final facility.
One woman asked if through the course of remodeling and adding on, whether the brickwork of the current facility would be covered up.
It wouldn’t all be gone, Jones said.
“The addition was attached to part of the east side of the building. It’s attached at the two-story piece of the sheriff’s department. This two-story element … would be attaching to that part of it, so everything to the south of that would still remain as it is.”
With current renderings of the building depicting it as matching the courthouse, others asked how it’d work with the old parts of the Sheriff’s Office.
However, as a resident of the neighborhood pointed out, the build absolutely throws off the symmetry of the site, even if it reflects the building well.
He also restated his concern that he didn’t want the final structure to turn into a “monolithic slab that sits across the street from my house and I’ll just be looking at the most depressing structure ever.”
As Jones said, work on the design is still in the conceptual phase and not final, but BKV wants the new build to complement both the Sheriff’s Office and the courthouse in the architecture and materials.
Inmates can still get sunlight through a combination of different options being considered, to answer another question offered. Skylights would be a simple way to deliver natural light to inmates while respecting their privacy from the outside and keeping inmates from disturbing the public from windows. As far as windows are concerned, treated windows, such as those with frosted glass, could also be a way to do this and help inject variety into the appearance of the exterior wall. Any such windows would not be in jail cells, it should be noted.
“We’re proposing to have some sort of treatment of windows on the exterior,” Jones said.
This helps relieve use of artificial lights, saving energy and money.
“It also helps the exterior sort of have a little bit more liveliness to it than it would if it were just like a warehouse space. We don’t want that,” Jones said.
Relocation possible?
How much consideration was given to relocating the jail?
This was never a serious consideration because of how safe and efficient it is to have a jail and courthouse side by side. By having the jail moved elsewhere, enormous amounts of time is spent preparing inmates for a drive to the courthouse, which isn’t ideal for a jail facility that needs all officers on site. It adds expenses by tying up an officer taxing multiple inmates a day back and forth.
As Commissioner Lee Ann Pierce explained, “Sometimes I’ve been in a county where the jail and the courthouse are not together. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work well with the court system, it doesn’t work well with law enforcement, and I personally as a commissioner was not interested in that.
“One of the things we talked about as a group to begin with that we would like to keep the two together so we would have the efficiency that you need in order to run a justice system.”
Contact Eric Sandbulte at esandbulte@brookingsregister.com.
