Hundreds tour new Yavapai County jail in Prescott offering on-site mental health support

PRESCOTT — Hundreds of Yavapai County residents showed up in droves to the grand opening of the Yavapai County Justice Center in Prescott last week where they could tour the new 98,000-square-foot facility.

“This is a symbol of community security, it's a symbol of public safety,” said Yavapai County Sheriff David Rhodes.

The new Justice Center will handle bookings for all arrests in western Yavapai County and hold pretrial detainees for a maximum of 14 days before they are either released using on-site reentry services or transferred to the Camp Verde Detention Center.

The new facility also includes a full-service Superior Court, alongside offices for the county attorney, public defender and probation.

The jail is unique in that there will be permanent behavioral health support on site in the connection center provided by Polara Health to help address some of the root causes of many low-level crimes, including mental illness and substance use.

“With the opening of the connection center, we’re taking a giant leap forward in fulfilling our commitment of serving our community in a holistic and inclusive manner,” Tamara Player of Polara said during the opening.

“By treating each person with dignity, respect and fairness, we can help them regain their lives, rediscover their worth and rebuild their future,” Player said.

Additionally, the county's "Reach Out" program is in place to connect recently released people to mental health and medical treatment providers, in addition to employment and transportation assistance.

"By recognizing what is driving that behavior, connecting people to services and compelling them to stay engaged through accountability practices involving the court, we’re going to lower recidivism,” Rhodes said. “In fact, we already have.”

County leaders have long expressed a need for a new jail

The new facility took nearly three years to build and cost $65 million, funded by the jail district quarter-cent tax in addition to property tax. The jail is free to use for all agencies in Yavapai County, other than tribal law enforcement, who do not pay the county property tax.

Prescott resident James Berney has personal experience working on the construction of a jail in California and determined the new jail is "pretty impressive."

“This is a whole different side of justice,” Berney said, referring to all of the programs and services offered at the single site.

The new location replaces the old jail in downtown Prescott that closed in 2009 after multiple U.S. Department of Justice reports noted unsafe conditions and overcrowding at the site.

The facility is the second jail serving Yavapai County, alongside the Camp Verde Detention Center, which was built in 2004 and has 600 beds. Like the new jail, it is also co-located with Superior Courts and provides reentry services.

Stretching back years, law enforcement leaders have reported the jail has been consistently at or over capacity in peak months since at least 2013.

This has only been exacerbated by the explosive population growth across the county and state within the last decade.

As the local population has continued to grow rapidly over the last decade, Prescott resident Kirk Storms said the city's need for a new jail increased along with it.

“They had to do this," Storms said.

And while just building more room to house inmates would solve the issue of overcrowding, it wouldn't attempt to address and resolve the impetus for crime in the first place, which is where the auxiliary services come into play.

“It's more than just jailing them, it's getting them resources so they don’t come back,” Storms said.

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New jail will better serve community needs, eliminate unnecessary travel for law enforcement

An independent consultant conducted a study of the county’s detention system between 2015 and 2016, known as the Chinn Report, and concluded that 65% of all arrests occurred in the Prescott/Quad Cities area.

There were 7,090 bookings in 2022, according to the Sheriff's Office, 65% of which were in western Yavapai County. Despite being arrested in or around Prescott, law enforcement would have to transfer many individuals to Camp Verde in order to detain them and move forward with their cases.

After spending a career working with telecommunications systems for detention centers, Doug Omata was impressed by the "state of the art" facility after completing the tour and took note of its location in the county. While working locally, Omata saw firsthand the hassle that came with having to shuttle inmates to and from Camp Verde.

“They’ll get better use of the personnel here,” Omata said.

The Chinn Report determined that having to transport inmates between Prescott and Camp Verde costs $2 million a year, while it simultaneously creates a major security risk for citizens of the county as officers are out of service for the hours it takes to travel back and forth.

The report recommended that the county implement programs to reduce jail populations and strengthen efficiency within the system, including developing pretrial and post-arrest diversion programs, expanding specialty courts and offering inmate assistance programs.

With the creation of the new jail in Prescott and other programs throughout the county, local law enforcement has taken steps toward meeting all of those recommendations.

“Reducing recidivism increases public safety, it increases positive outcomes for the community, positive outcomes for those people who have broken the law and positive outcomes for their families,” Rhodes said. “And that is what the intent is behind this facility."

Reach the reporter at LLatch@gannett.com.

The Republic’s coverage of northern Arizona is funded, in part, with grants from Vitalyst Health Foundation and Report from America. To support regional Arizona news coverage like this, make a tax-deductible donation at supportjournalism.azcentral.com.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Yavapai County jail opens in Prescott, includes mental health support