'It was outdated when they built it': Why Monroe County is 'past due' on a new jail
Editor's note: This is the first in a series of stories looking at conditions in the Monroe County Jail. This story highlights some of the problems and the history of jail discussions. Subsequent stories will take a deeper look at issues of mental health care, recidivism and programs designed to reduce reincarceration, and how long local court cases are taking to resolve.
"Secure" doors that don't always lock.
Not enough safe cells for people with mental health issues.
Three inmate suicides since 2015.
Buckets in hallways collecting water dripping from overhead pipes.
A shortage of jailers.
Elevator malfunctions.
Almost 300 beds crammed into a jail built for 128 prisoners.
No space to expand.
"I think we need to have a new jail right now," Monroe County Correctional Center Commander Sam Crowe said last month, standing on the jail's first level where arrested people get booked in.
"They've been talking about this the past 20 years."
The Monroe County Correctional Center’s best-by date passed a long time ago. The jail's problems started early on, and 36 years, a surging inmate population and public officials’ complacency have left the jail with urgent, expensive needs.
There's widespread agreement a new correctional center is needed.
"The current commissioners and council seem pretty open minded and agree that a new jail is past due," Crowe said.
More:Monroe County jail committee struggles to make progress without quorum
A 2020 criminal justice and incarceration study of Monroe County by Kenneth A. Ray Justice Services LLC delved deep and concurs. The thorough report, printed out on both sides of paper, stacks an inch high and takes hours to read.
"Monroe County taxpayers are burdened with a facility that is unreasonably expensive to maintain and operate," it states.
While repair costs are estimated at $56 million,the price tag for a new jail in Monroe County is an unknown that depends on the final plan.
The same story again and again
It was a 1981 lawsuit based on poor conditions at the previous Monroe County Jail that resulted in the current jail's construction.
The jail before this one, built in 1936 with room for 55 prisoners, was on the west side of Walnut Street between Fourth Street and Kirkwood Avenue. As jails often are, it was expanded, and eventually had space for 98 inmates.
Sometimes, just two jailers would be on duty. Prisoners occasionally slept on bare floors.
A 1977 study revealed the previous jail had "deterioration extending from the roof to the plumbing and heating systems as well as jail equipment and hardware," a newspaper account said.
The study underestimated how the jail population would evolve through the century, wrongly projecting that by the year 2000, the local jail would have an average of about 50 inmates per day.
The reality was four times that.
Two county commissioners and three county council members sit on the Criminal Justice Response Committee, which meets every month. Members have reviewed the Ray report and are working to resolve current jail issues and identify a path forward. They are scheduling tours of the facility to get a close-up look.
Meanwhile, the jail remains crowded. It's falling apart. And many of the people incarcerated there have mental health issues jail staff can't adequately address.
During a recent tour, a woman in a cellblock wailed and shouted. Her cries echoed down a hallway where water leaking from the ceiling filled a few strategically placed plastic buckets.
"She probably should be in a mental health facility," Crowe said, acknowledging the jail often serves that role. "There's no place for her."
Suggested solutions go back decades
In 2002, Charlotte Zietlow served as chairwoman of a Community Corrections Facility Task Force that made recommendations to the commissioners. Zietlow served in various elected local government positions and had a broad overview of conditions and challenges at the jail.
The building at Seventh Street and College Avenue that houses the jail has since been renamed the Charlotte Zietlow Justice Center.
Twenty years ago, she wrote an editorial column for the newspaper stating the county should immediately build a community corrections facility and a juvenile treatment center "so that we do not have to build a new jail at all."
The current jail, the task force said, could be made smaller and reserved "for those individuals who pose real threats to the safety of our community."
The 2002 task force also recommended a review of policies contributing to overcrowding and called those in place "insufficient to address the issues of recidivism and chronic mental illness and substance abuse that are so often factors in the cycle of incarceration, release and reincarceration," Zietlow wrote.
"This, we concluded, was an expensive and wasteful routine for the taxpayers, the incarcerated, and the community in general."
Just three weeks after the current jail locked up its first inmates, the facility already was too small.
On the 20th day, 137 inmates were booked into the 134-person-capacity jail at the corner of Seventh Street and College Avenue in downtown Bloomington.
Crowe described county officials in years past as being "like an ostrich with its head in the sand" as they refrained from taking any steps toward building a new and bigger jail. County leaders have instead kept the jail patched and functional.
Limiting the jail population is mandated by a 1998 class-action lawsuit settlement that caps the number of prisoners at 278. If the number goes beyond that, judges must release inmates or transfer some to a jail in another county.
In 2008, a consulting firm estimated the cost of a new jail, with 478 beds, at $47 million. There was talk of constructing an $85 million corrections campus on county-owned property at the old RCA/Thomson site that would have included a jail, a juvenile detention facility and sheriff's office.
That is no longer an option. Some of the county-owned land at the RCA/Thomson site has since become Osage Place, a Habitat for Humanity housing development. What's left under county control is an unlikely location, Monroe County Commissioners President Julie Thomas said, given the changing landscape of that part of town.
"With the construction of the Switchyard Park, I-69, and Catalent’s expansion, the county is exploring other options," Thomas said.
Instead of forging ahead with a new-jail plan, the county invested $1 million for upgrades to extend the existing jail's life expectancy.
Those renovations 15 years ago created video conferencing booths for inmate visitation, new and safer interior cellblock windows, updated padded cells and added a new booking area.
The jail also doubled cold food storage space and increased dry food storage by 300%. At the time, there was only room to store two days' worth of food, "which could cause a problem during a pandemic illness or other situation," former jail commander Bill Wilson said back then.
Crowe started at the jail as a corrections officer in 1995, when the facility was less than a decade old. There already were serious structural, mechanical and logistical issues.
"It was outdated when they built it," Crowe said.
For years, county officials have talked about the need for a new jail. For years, plans got tabled as millions in tax dollars were spent shoring up the 1985-built facility housed in the five-story Zietlow Justice Center in downtown Bloomington
The building also houses the county court system and its nine judges.
In 2022, no one's advocating a future for the current jail. No one's side-stepping the realities there. Not anymore.
"At 36 years old, the jail has far exceeded its structural and functional life cycle, despite all its renovations," the jail study notes. County jails generally last about 30 years.
Crowe said it's time to act. "Even if they decided today to build it, they still have to find property, get it designed and then build it.”
High-risk problems
The 2020 study dissects the criminal justice and jail systems in Monroe County. It identifies 53 problem areas inside the jail. Fifty-three security problems created by physical defects, inadequate architectural design and deterioration "that impact proper care and treatment."
Fixing it all, the report concludes, "seems cost prohibitive." The jail has been pieced together for years, Crowe said, and the ailing facility puts already overworked staff at risk.
"County officials are burdened with a correctional facility that should be considered high risk for liability due to the real and potential risk of harm to inmates, staff and the public,” the study says.
Workers, once called in to make repairs as needed, now arrive every day. Not only was the jail construction and design poor, so were the materials, Crowe said. Many of the fixtures haven't been updated since the jail was built in 1985, so it's also expensive and difficult to find replacement parts.
Multiple security liabilities exist, including the possibility of makeshift weapons made from failing jail infrastructure, such as plaster and metal pieces.
The building is occupied 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That means it wears out faster than other structures, and the people inside test its limits. If there is a mechanism to be defeated, Crowe said it will be found and exploited.
A big concern is that about 20 of the jail's “secure” doors are faulty, and correctional officers don’t know when the next door won’t shut and lock properly. The doors are located within multi-unit pods and lock inmates into their cells.
The most recent state jail inspection report noted the pod door locks “are failing and are easily defeated.” Retrofitting the locks will cost half a million dollars.
These faulty locks reflect a dilemma. Does the county continue making temporary and costly repairs while anticipating a new jail, fixing one problem here and another there as a sea of other needs languish?
"Do we spend that money for new locks or put it toward a new facility?" Crowe asked.
Even with everything in working order, Crowe described the jail as "very labor intensive." During an 8-hour shift, correction officers end up walking about five miles, making rounds and escorting inmates. There are 180 stationary security cameras throughout the jail, but no surveillance cameras in individual cells to monitor people. It's up to the jailers to listen and keep watch.
The building requires more staff because of its design, with cellblocks on multiple floors and on both sides of the facility. Crowe said the jail currently has 10 fewer jailers than it should. The shortage is exacerbated when officers are pulled to escort prisoners to the second and third floors for court hearings and to transport inmates to other towns. A lot of overtime is required, Crowe said, which increases the jail's operating costs.
Overcrowding in a failing facility
A new jail is needed not just because of the endless fix-it list, but also for it to hold down the county jail population.
The jail can't expand any more, and the population is beginning to increase as the pandemic wanes. The number of people being arrested is starting to climb as life, and crime, return to pre-COVID 19 levels.
Data from the jail study, which goes through 2019, show people booked into jail are staying "considerably longer." From 2003 to 2018, the average length of stay increased by 3.7 days, from 18.5 to 22.2.
And despite a decrease in the number of jail bookings, the average daily jail population increased from 251 in 2004 to 294 in 2019. A cycle is created as inmates get released and often end up re-offending and getting arrested again.
The number of people booked into jail just one time, from 2004 through 2018, decreased 27%. But the number of people booked more than one time increased by 38%.
With overcrowding, Crowe said jail authorities have to get creative sometimes about how and where to place people. When someone is booked into the jail, they are classified on a point scale based on criteria that determine how dangerous a person is and where they should be placed security-wise.
But when the jail population goes above 80% of capacity, Crowe said it gets harder to make sure they place "lambs with lambs" and "lions with lions" within cellblocks.
When there were 300 prisoners, many slept on the floor. The jail bought raised plastic bed pallets that are stacked in hallways because forcing inmates to sleep directly on the floor is illegal.
The shortage of space extends beyond general housing. The jail doesn’t have enough detox rooms, enough quarantine cells, enough mental health housing, enough room for recreation. Every space is reserved for beds.
"It really ties our hands on what we can accomplish here," Crowe said. “Every nook and cranny that was here before, every closet, has been filled.”
Concerns regarding inmate needs range from the inability to separate people, inadequate program space and a lack of mental health services.
"The jail facility is incapable of consistently ensuring and sustaining constitutional levels of inmate care and custody," the jail study said. "The facility is ill designed to accommodate the array of health care treatment services required to meet constitutional levels of care or programs to prepare inmates for successful community reentry."
Hands tied
Jailers do what they can for inmates with the resources at hand. If officers treat jailed people with respect, Crowe said inmates most often will return it. "We are whatever they need at that time because we are all they got," Crowe said.
They want to have more programs but don’t have the space. Some programs are returning after the pandemic shut them down.
For instance, the jail partners with Monroe County Public Library to stock shelves with new books based on inmate requests. The kitchen manager hunts for deals and buys in bulk to feed people quality food while staying under the $1.24 per inmate state cap for each meal.
The jail participates in a program for incarcerated parents to read to their children. The jail provides sweaters to conceal inmate jumpsuits and a backdrop to sit in front of to cover the institutional cement-block walls.
Crowe has a jail trustee, one of 18 inmates who work in the kitchen and perform other duties, painting the upper portion the jail walls sky blue because it is more calming than plaster white.
'The county will seek public input'
No one knows when the county will proceed with long-talked-about plans for a new facility. An initial timetable suggested construction begin in 2024 and be completed by 2026.
Thomas, president of the Monroe County Board of Commissioners, is well aware the jail discussion goes back two decades.
It looks as if the talking will continue, as the county undertakes what Thomas called "a holistic review" she said will look at current and future needs to help determine what a new facility will include.
Questions, the same ones from years ago, remain.
How big would the correctional center be? Should there be a less-secure place for non-violent offenders? Therapeutic options for people with mental health issues? What about a juvenile detention center? Courtrooms? What happens to the justice center building once the jail moves out?
"That review includes a look at what departments and functions should be moved, what services, including new services, are needed, and what functions need to stay in the downtown area," Thomas said in a email response to questions regarding the future of the jail.
"In addition," she said, "the county will seek public input on the outcomes of that work."
As far as a location, Thomas said, "The plan is to have a final determination for the site by the end of the year."
In the meantime, the jail staff continues to serve the needs of the temporary residents of their “city within a city,” as Crowe calls the jail, struggling to do so while keeping themselves safe.
Waiting for word. Not holding their breath. As the clock keeps ticking.
Cate Charron is an intern at The Herald-Times and can be reached at ccharron@heraldt.com or on Twitter at @CateCharron.
Reporter Laura Lane can be reached at llane@heraldt.com or at 812-331-4362 or 812-318-5967.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Why does Monroe County need a new jail?
