With all the talk lately about whats going to go on the second floor of the Law Enforcement Center I thought I’d take the opportunity to debunk a common misconception. The jail as it was built was never meant to house inmates in the second floor space where Social Services (or some other agency) will ultimately reside. I’m not sure where that came from but one look at the space and you can tell that it is not, nor was it ever intended for the secure detention of inmates. I was working in the old jail during the design phase of the new facility but wasn’t in on any of those discussion so I can only imagine that this notion might have come from one of the early, preliminary building designs.
The second floor as it exists today was clearly designed for office space. Jail construction typically doesn’t include large windows, for obvious reasons, which this space has lots of. Nor does jail construction typically include open, exposed ceilings like you see in the photo.
2nd floor office space
Take a look at the Maximum Classification housing unit photos in the Jail Tour and you can see that the type of construction on the second floor is nothing like how an actual jail is built. In our facility the housing units have skylights in the day rooms but don’t include any windows at all (the two recreation rooms do have windows). You’ll also see that the ceilings in the jail are concrete beam construction and totally different than the exposed steel construction over the second floor space. Granted the 2nd floor is unfinished space and the photos of the jail were taken after completion but the difference is still pretty obvious. Lastly, drywall isn’t used in a jail, again for obvious reasons. In the above photo, however, you can see lots of drywall. Clearly this space was never intended for jail space.
Two of the housing units in our jail do have a second tier mezzanine complete with finished and inmate ready cells and perhaps thats where the misconceptions come from.
Another thing I hear quite often is that we built too big of a jail and now we don’t have enough inmates to fill it. The implication and misconception here being that the planners over estimated our local need. My understanding is that the jail was built for the future and the decision was made to build big enough in 2005 so that the county wouldn’t have to face the overcrowding issue every few years. We now have a jail that will meet our needs for the foreseeable future. For more info on the whole design and building process see my History Of The New Law Enforcement Center post from last August.
There may also have been hope that surrounding counties that were in the same predicament as Hubbard in terms of over crowding, would want to house their excess population in our jail and for a while after we first opened that was in fact what happened. Crow Wing County then opened their new facility in Brainerd and shortly thereafter the new Tri County Correctional facility opened in Crookston. In the space of just a couple years an area that had a shortage of jail space now had an adequate supply.
I hesitate to quote myself but I’m going to close this post with this (from my 2011 Year In Review post):
Corrections and jail facilities are infrastructure and are no different then the highway department or a municipal public works department. You can’t have law enforcement with out jails and you can’t have a civil society where citizens are free to engage, without fear, in the daily activities of a free and open free-market democracy without law enforcement and jails.
From → Corrections
