CLEVELAND, Ohio -- The aging Cuyahoga County Jail is approaching full capacity again after last year’s historic lows, and the consultant spearheading the process of building a new jail warned public officials on Wednesday that if they can’t keep population from growing, they will have to build a facility that is much bigger -- and more expensive -- than originally thought.
After an unprecedented effort by county judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and sheriff’s staff to clear inmates out of the jail during the coronavirus pandemic saw the number of inmates dip below 1,000 last year, the population in August was back up to 1,630 inmates, Jeffrey Appelbaum said during the Justice Center steering committee meeting. The state prison system pegged the jail’s safe-rated capacity at 1,765 inmates.
Jeffrey Appelbaum said that if plans to institute bail reform, create a centralized booking process and divert low-level, nonviolent offenders with mental health or medical needs from jail to treatment do not ramp up in the coming months, he and the architecture firm tapped to design the new jail will have to plan for a jail larger than the target of 1,600 beds.
“We’d be building a much bigger jail than we already have,” Appelbaum said. “Which would not keep within budget we talked about, it would be higher. Frankly, operationally, it would be an issue.”
County Executive Armond Budish, who on Wednesday announced he will ask county council to permanently extend a .25% sales tax hike set to expire in 2027 to pay for the new facility, said his plan is based on the current estimate of about $550 million for a jail that will hold about 1,600 inmates.
“Financing would still hold if it goes higher,” Budish said. “But at some point, we won’t be able to afford it.”
The comments came during Thursday’s were to the 12-member steering committee that includes members of Budish’s administration including Sheriff Christopher Viland, as well as representatives from County Council, Cleveland City Council, the Common Pleas Court, Cleveland Municipal Court Prosecutor Michael O’Malley’s office and Public Defender Cullen Sweeney. The committee has met since 2019 to hash out early plans for the jail.
Appelbaum also said Wednesday that discussions about whether to renovate the courts towers at the Cuyahoga County Justice Center or build a new facility somewhere else, which were put on hold in the spring to get the jail project moving, are expected to resume in the coming months.
Cleveland City Council President Kevin Kelley did not attend the meeting. Council did not have a representative at the meeting for the second consecutive time.
Jail population hampering plans
Appelbaum spent the vast majority of the over two-hour meeting discussing the jail’s population and urged the committee to consider what efforts to reduce the population county leaders can accelerate. The architects hired to design the jail first need to know how big of a facility is needed, and that largely depends on the amount of inmates the county expects to hold.
The committee in 2019 started the jail process intending to build a jail that would house between 1,350 and 1,600 inmates, Appelbaum said. That is what the roughly $500 million price tag was based on. At the time, the jail’s average daily population was above 2,000.
The committee at the time said it could reduce the chronically overcrowded jail population by enacting “system changes” that included bail reform, building a diversion center and opening a centralized booking facility.
Two years later, much of that work has barely gotten off the ground.
This year started out with an average daily population in January of about 1,340. That number increased each month to August’s average of 1,632, Appelbaum said. A county spokeswoman said the jail’s population on Thursday was 1,611 inmates.
Cleveland.com and The Plain Dealer reported last month that the City of Cleveland, which accounts for the vast majority of inmates who wind up in the county jail, had only sent three people to the county’s diversion center since it opened in March.
Brandy Carney, the chief of special operations, told the committee that as of Thursday, the Cleveland had sent a total of 10 people to the center, which has 50 beds.
“We really expect to have large numbers from Cleveland police, but that hasn’t happened yet,” Carney said.
Public Safety Chief Bob Coury said the centralized booking unit is under construction and the county hopes to have the process up and running by the end of this year. Doing so could help divert more inmates into the diversion center and cut down on the number of days that inmates stay in the facility before hearings when they receive bond and can potentially be released.
Common Pleas Court Judge Brendan Sheehan said that, even with the court holding fewer trials, the jail population has hovered in the 1,600s for the past month. He pointed out that more than 85% of the inmates are charged with serious violent felonies.
All three said they believed the jail population would decrease once the projects were in place and the courts are able to lift restrictions and conduct more jury trials.
But Appelbaum said planners have to act on the current trends, not projections. He said the plan is to build a jail that can be easily added onto in the future if needed, but that the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, which oversees and regulates local jails, will not let the county build a jail too small.
“What we do in the short-term is going to be critical,” Appelbaum said.
Appelbaum asked the committee if it would be a better idea to hold put the project on hold to get a better sense of the jail population -- even though the county loses about $45 million each year the current jail stays open.
Viland pointed out in his response that the current jail is not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act and cannot meet state standards.
“That is something that should not be delayed,” Viland said.
Viland said that he believed that a projection of about 2,000 inmates, with several hundred on GPS monitoring, is a realistic projection based on the history of the jail population.
Cuyahoga County Public Defender Cullen Sweeney said that the jail had successfully gotten the population down to 1,000 inmates last year without impacting public safety.
“I don’t want to accept that we would go back to 2,000 people in the jail,” he said. “I think everything we’ve experienced in the last year, we can do far better than that.”
What’s next?
The county this week is posting two new positions to help manage the jail population. The first, a senior business intelligence analyst, will collect and analyze data from the jail and report to the sheriff’s department. The county posted that job position on Monday, Coury said.
The county also expects to post the position of jail population manager on Friday. That position, which the committee first agreed to create in 2019, will ideally be someone with experience working in a jail and will have the “gravitas” to oversee jail population reforms and implement changes, Coury said.
That person will report directly to Budish’s Chief of Staff Bill Mason, Coury said.
Appelbaum also laid out what he called “an aggressive” schedule to complete the design process of the jail. The county could have an initial cost estimate by Oct. 6, another estimate in January 2022, a 50% cost estimate next March, and the final guaranteed maximum price of the project by June 30, Appelbaum said.
The project managers for HOK, the St. Louis-based architecture firm tapped to lead the project, also briefly addressed the committee and showed photographs of other corrections and court houses the firm designed in cities including Indianapolis, Detroit
The county public works department issued a request for qualifications on Monday for a design-builder, and expects to select a design-builder just before Thanksgiving, Appelbaum said.