Counties Making Due with Tight Budgets

Overcrowding continues in county jails, but widespread budget shortfalls are forcing many local officials to think twice about building an all-new jail facility. Cautious county commissioners find expansions and equipment upgrades much more attractive in the current budget climate.

Detention equipment contractors report that work is out there, but is much harder to find. Fewer are heard to brag that the detention market is “recession proof.” Planning is far more restrained than during the 1990s, a time of budget surpluses when many counties found new jail facilities within their grasp.

Just one of the counties experiencing the downsizing trend is Carter County, Ga., where planners decided to build around the existing facility even though it is in many ways obsolete, according to Bob Goble of Carter Goble Lee, a national provider of justice architecture and programming services.

“Five years ago, I would dare say Carter County would have probably abandoned the facility,” says Goble. “Now you’ve got a county saying, ‘Look. We can’t afford to walk away from this old jail even though there’s a lot of it that’s obsolete. We’ve got to find ways to use the parts of the jail that can have a lifecycle built back into them with some good remodeling.’ We are seeing a good bit of that kind of strategy.”

Still, the jail in Carter County is newer than many others. Built in 1981, it really was subsequent expansions that gave today’s planners something with which to work. In particular, a 1996 expansion that added an up-to-date medical services facility large enough to accommodate inmates from the existing 338-bed facility, as well as inmates to be housed in the planned expansion-underscoring the wisdom of providing enough programming space for future population growth.

The need for additional bed space remains the most pressing in Carter County and elsewhere, says Goble. But the demand for community-based facilities to be included in jail projects has increased recently, as communities and county officials seek alternatives to incarceration. The situation represents a confluence of two trends; the scaling back of correctional budgets and population drops on the state level.

“Spatially, more counties are more willing to build space for rehabilitation programs, inmate activities, education, and jail industries,” says Goble. “Community-based programs are more palatable to counties today than they were five and 10 years ago. Counties heard enough about it to realize that it makes sense. It reduces recidivism rates, and group activity spaces are inexpensive compared to high-security cells.”

Criminologists point to alternative sentencing programs as one of the reasons behind the recent drop in overall state prison populations. If the flow of new county jails entering the pipeline has slowed, the number of new state prisons proposed during the last round of legislative sessions barely amounted to a trickle.

Equipment Upgrades

With 48 states facing budget deficits, state correctional construction projects are also being downsized or delayed. “Most of the projects we see right now are maintenance-related, either replacing perimeters, control systems, or upgrading roofs and other things,” says Alan Latta, founder of Latta Technical Services (LTS), a consulting firm operating in the middle United States.

“A lot of systems from the late 1980s and early 90s are now at the end of their useful life, due to wear and tear, the unavailability of parts, or being unable to maintain the proprietary equipment,” says Latta. “Some providers have gone out of business.”

Nevertheless, options exist in security electronics technology that didn’t 15 years ago. In addition, technology that was new in the early 90s is not only more widely accepted and provides better functionality, but can also be cheaper in many cases.

“In the last four or five years, we’ve seen digital recording start to become accessibly priced and we’re applying it more. Taking digital communications and putting them on networks within the facility and related facilities, and you can look at video from remote locations by using a standard Internet connection or Ethernet networking,” says Latta. Camera monitors now not only feed images to central control, but also to administration areas.

The cost of touchscreen systems also has come down considerably, in some regions becoming price-comparable with hard panels, especially in the upper Midwest where industrial control systems similar to correctional touchscreens are already widely used.

“In any application of electronic security in a correctional facility, the control systems are really tools to help the staff do their job well,” says Latta. The widening acceptance of card access readers has brought a new ease of staff movement to corrections and wireless duress systems have improved response times, both capabilities that make retrofits appealing.

But Latta warns that security electronic retrofits should not be viewed as mere replacements. “You’re not taking advantage of the opportunity to go in and merely change out the controls so they work,” he says, advising that planners first evaluate how their operation is functioning, and then determine how the technology can improve efficiency. “How is the facility different from when the original operations system was designed? How would operations change with a new set of tools that are more flexible and user-friendly?”

More than ever, shrewd planning and cost-effectiveness are watchwords in an era of tight budgets. Local and state agencies must assess their projects carefully to make the most of what little capital is available.