Howard County OKs $2.2M to buy land for new jail

Howard County is purchasing nearly 48 acres of land near Markland Avenue and Dixon Road with plans to build a new, larger county jail on it.

The revelation was announced Tuesday by Howard County Commissioner Jack Dodd, R-District 2, at the Howard County Council’s final meeting of the year.

The County Council unanimously approved an additional appropriation of $2.2 million of economic development income tax funds for the purchase of the land at 2200 W. Markland Ave., just west of the current county jail. The sale is expected to be closed upon in the near future.

The cost of the new jail and how the county plans on paying for it will not be known until likely next year, but the county is expecting it to cost more than $100 million, Dodd told the Tribune.

County Council President John Roberts said the board is in preliminary discussions with financial advisors on how best to go about paying for the new jail. The financing will almost certainly include issuing bond debt.

Whether or not any tax increases will be needed to pay the expected debt remains to be seen. The county approved last year to raise the local income tax by 0.2% to 1.95% to help with operations costs associated with the county jail.

The commissioners are expected to soon put out a Request for Proposal for a construction manager for the project, an act Dodd said could happen as early as the next commissioners meeting Monday. Details, such as bed capacity and features of the jail, will be hashed out next year.

The county’s current jail is more than 30-years old, is often overcrowded and well above its rated bed capacity and is in mostly “fair” and “poor” condition, according to a recently completed feasibility study.

For the last several years, the jail has been the elephant in the room for county officials, who have tried to avoid getting to this point through several efforts.

Such efforts include petitioning and receiving approval from the state to hire a magistrate judge to quicken the release of inmates and ease caseloads in hopes to lower the jail capacity.

In 2018, the county started its male work release program, offering judges another sentencing option for non-violent offenders than jail. In 2021, the county’s female work release program started.

Most recently, the county agreed to employ additional deputy prosecutors and public defenders for the magistrate courts in hopes to speed up pretrial hearings.

None of the measures have worked as well as hoped.

Instead, for the last several months, the county has sent between 80-90 inmates to other in-state county jails. That has cost the county approximately $100,000 a month as state law requires counties pay other counties a per diem for each inmate each day they are held.

In early 2020, the late Jim Papacke, then a county councilman, implored the county to be “proactive” and consider building new jail pods to increase bed capacity or potentially face a lawsuit from an inmate, leading the county to potentially being told what to do by a federal judge.

Those lawsuits came in 2023, when the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana filed two federal lawsuits against the county, alleging the overcrowding amounted to a violation of the U.S. Constitution through not allowing proper recreational time for inmates and causing frequent water leaks and fights.

One of the two lawsuits was voluntarily dismissed; the county recently reached a settlement in the second lawsuit. The settlement still has to be approved by the judge.

In a prepared statement to the County Council, Dodd said the decision to build a new jail comes not from a strong desire to do so but a fear of losing local control of what a new jail would be as result of the lawsuits.

Dodd said he was told in November by the federal judge overseeing the ACLU lawsuit that the county had two choices — either renovate or build a new jail.

“Nobody, and I mean nobody, wants to build a new jail,” Dodd said. “Nobody. I’ll emphasize that, nobody, but here we are. … We’ve kicked this can so far down the road, you can’t recognize the can anymore and there’s no road left to kick it down.”

In August, the commissioners approved a feasibility study to find out the costs of renovating the county jail. According to Dodd, the study came back with a $95 million cost estimate and that would only get the county some of what it needs, such as more pod space, a bigger kitchen and laundry facility and more.

The county also wants to switch to indirect supervision, which is less labor intensive than the jail’s current configuration of direct supervision.

“If we were to renovate, we would’ve had, for part of the jail, indirect supervision and another part of the jail direct supervision — that would have never worked,” Dodd said. “So taking all that in consideration, it just made sense to build a new one.”