Talk of new Fond du Lac County justice center has social media in an uproar

After building a new highway garage complex just outside of the City of Fond du Lac, the county bought more land next to the facility with the thoughts of building a new jail.

While that idea was brewing, conversation arose as to how limitations in the current court house, and sheriff’s office could be remedied with building new facilities at the new location as well. While nothing has been set in stone yet, this “news” has recently surfaced on social media and the proposed estimate of a $400 million price tag has gotten many riled up over how that will affect taxes for years to come.

KFIZ was recently sent a lengthy but well thought out write up by county board member Katherine Griffith, who was initially part of an ad hoc committee to study the need for a new jail and make recommendations. This letter was shared with the hopes of spreading information on the hows and whys, and to quell any anger and turmoil caused by any speculations and mis-information being put out on social media.

The following is the letter:

A number like $400 million makes me sit up and pay attention, which is what I was doing recently at a joint meeting of our Public Safety and Highway Committees. The number was the upper end of the consultants’ cost estimate for a new Fond du Lac County Justice Center. The two committees, meeting jointly to consider this ambitious infrastructure project, voted to recommend that the County Board seek bids for architectural plans for the proposed new Justice Center. The Board will vote on this recommendation at its December meeting.

But let’s back up. This is just the most recent step of a process that started in 2021 when the County Board voted to buy a parcel of land by the Highway Department for the new jail they knew we would need. That decision was itself the result of a years-long stream of data about the problems of the current jail. 

A year ago, the County named an ad hoc committee (I was a member) to study the need for a new jail and make recommendations to the whole Board. As part of our work with professional consultants from the Samuels Group, we toured existing jails and studied everything from the dysfunctions of our current facility to the latest modular designs for cell blocks. We explored various options, and eventually this committee of nine, including four citizens selected by County Executive Kaufman, recommended that the county go ahead with the Justice Center. I was uncomfortable with the fiscal implications and what I felt was a too-narrow focus of our deliberations (more about that below). However, the committee (and my role) came to an end and the work was handed over to the two standing committees of the county board with expertise in public safety and infrastructure.

The easy part of this was why we needed a new jail. Here’s why we do. 

We are bursting at the seams. For several years we have been at or above our jail’s operating capacity and we’re now consistently housing 20-25 inmates in Green Lake and monitoring another 15-30 on GPS house arrest. Some on GPS are in danger of relapsing on substance abuse outside of jail.

Parts of our jail are over 70 years old. We have bursting sewer pipes, sinking floors, and inadequate ventilation. We have bathrooms that are not handicapped accessible and cannot be made so. We lack required natural lighting and regulation-size cells. Inadequate wiring means a tangle of extension cords snaking down hallways in violation of fire codes.

Our building requires a lot of people to manage. By law, high-risk inmates must be monitored every 15 minutes 24/7 and the rest every 30 minutes. Those who do this work walk many miles during a shift. New facilities give a single person in a central glass hub a direct line of sight to 150 inmates at a time from their desk. 

There are security issues. Additions and renovations over the years have led to a maze of a jail with poor visibility and constricted spaces. Escorting prisoners to court and elsewhere is complicated, time-consuming, and less secure than it should be.

Today’s inmates are older, sicker, more addicted, and more likely to suffer from mental health problems than in the past. There are fewer juveniles, more women, and more violent prisoners. Previously we could house many inmates in group dorms. Now they must be segregated not only by gender, but by age, medical and mental health status, and risk of violence. This means our large group spaces are underutilized while we lack sufficient individual cells. Our current facilities make medical attention of all kinds more difficult to provide. 

Our jail lacks room to provide services that could reduce recidivism. Church and volunteer groups would gladly offer Bible studies, exercise programs and the like, but our jail has inadequate space for more than very limited offerings.

So yes, we need to do something about our jail. WHAT to do is the harder question. The two standing committees, meeting together, have looked at two primary options in recent months.

Option 1: A Justice Center: The proposed Justice Center would likely house a 450-bed jail (including a juvenile wing), the Sheriff’s Office, Clerk of Court, various courts, and the District Attorney’s office in a single integrated facility. The many benefits would include better security; adequate, functional space for everything; and solutions to the numerous problems with the current jail and courtrooms. The proposed Justice Center would also reduce operating costs, with far fewer staff needed to monitor inmates and ensure efficient, safe access to courtrooms. Since personnel costs are the single largest item in the county budget this is an important consideration. A final consideration is that  the Justice Center jail would initially be bigger than we need, and until we grow into it, we could earn revenue by housing out-of-county inmates and juveniles. This would not cover capital costs, but we could ease operating costs this way. All told, our consultants estimate this new Justice Center could cost $300–400 million. 

Option 2: A new 300-bed jail downtown: We cannot add onto the current jail because there is neither space nor a stable subsoil foundation. However, we could put a new facility, probably for 300 inmates, across the street in a current parking lot. This would be linked via skywalk to the existing courts, Sheriff’s Office, DA’s Office, etc. We would not have to (nor be able to) replace those facilities in this scenario. This option would include building the 300-bed new jail, stabilizing and renovating the existing jail, partly renovating the courtrooms, expanding the Sheriff’s Office, and acquiring land for a new parking lot. While it would certainly cost less than the Justice Center option, we have no reliable cost estimates. We do know it won’t be chump change ($150-200 million has been suggested). Because the cost of getting well-informed cost estimates is itself substantial, the Board will be seeking estimates only for the Justice Center at this time.

Why wasn’t the 300-bed jail the first choice of either the Ad Hoc Jail Committee or the Public Safety and Highway Committees?

There are some significant downsides to this approach. First, this site, like the current jail, is close to the river, and the river sometimes floods. Replacing the lost parking space would not be easy (houses would be demolished), cheap, or convenient for users. There are numerous problems with our aging and too-small courts; we could make only modest improvements to them if they stay in the current structure. 

Renovating parts of the old jail to keep the best parts functioning would not be cheap, and the end result would be significantly inferior to a new facility. We could also encounter potentially expensive surprises in the course of renovating. The labor-intensiveness of the old jail would continue, and the two-story new jail would also be more labor-intensive and thus expensive to run than the one-story version we could build as part of the Justice Center. 

There are also numerous deficiencies with the Sheriff’s office. Sheriff Waldschmidt provided a colorful and eye-opening list, including testing drugs in an open hallway, and many of these issues must be remedied. Finally, we have had a history of choosing the cheaper options for expanding and fixing our jail, and today’s result is a facility that is inefficient, over-crowded, in violation of various codes, and generally suboptimal. Finally, connecting a brand new jail to aging and already-problematic courts and other facilities saddles us with this downtown site with its many limitations for a long time to come.

Is there a compromise option?

Possibly. Another alternative is to build a new jail (probably 450 beds) out at the new site and leave the other facilities where they are. We could either keep the facilities separate for the foreseeable future, or we could plan for a phased move, starting with the jail, and building it so that planned add-ons (courts, the Sheriff’s Office, etc.) could be built later, as fiscal and other circumstances dictate. 

However, keeping the jail separate from the courts has major downsides. Transporting prisoners to and from court is labor-intensive and would significantly increase our operating costs. No, not all appearances can be done via video; the Sheriff estimates about 3,000 transports per year. These transports are where the vast majority of assaults and escapes occur. The judges consider separating the courts from the jail the worst option. Furthermore, we would still need to have holding facilities by the courts, including potential duplication of services. We’d still need to build a new sallyport (entrance and exit to the jail) and modify the ingress/egress connections to the courts. We’d still need to expand the Sheriff’s Office. The complexities of separate facilities would increase costs and aggravation for our staff for years to come. It is also unlikely that paying for later phases of the project will get easier over time. In general, construction costs outpace overall inflation, and interest rates are hard to predict.

What other considerations are there?

Jettisoning our downtown campus entirely would be a costly headache in itself, and County Executive Sam Kaufman has said he may veto our doing so. Taking the jail and related facilities out of our city center could also have economic and other consequences for the downtown. And obviously, the fiscal implications of our decision could be considerable. But we won’t get good numbers until architects rough out a plan, which is what the county board will vote (or not) to contract for in December. 

Beyond these considerations are two basic questions that were raised but have not been addressed in any of the discussions so far: What factors are driving our rising jail population, and what measures could bring it down and reduce the size of the jail we need to build?

A jail capacity planning guide published by the US Department of Justice recommends a systems approach to the question of jail populations, recognizing that there are numerous factors that determine how many people wind up in jail and how long they stay there: population trends, crime rates, enforcement priorities; how prosecutors and judges do their jobs and how well resourced they are; wait times for court hearings; jail diversion efforts such as drug courts; practices around parole violations, etc. Some counties have lowered their jail populations through diversion programs, drug and alcohol treatment, and crisis response programs. Others build transitional housing and programs to try to keep specific at-risk groups out of jail. Some jurisdictions invest in more legal staff to speed up proceedings and shorten jail stays.

We have addressed some of these things in Fond du Lac County. We used to have a drug court, we are ramping up our Medication Assisted Treatment for substance use in the jail, and the state has recently allocated new resources to the DA’s office to address staffing shortfalls. Some of us (myself included) believe these sorts of measures should have been discussed as part of the planning process, with a new jail as one component embedded in a larger vision of the county justice system. However, the idea of a more integrated planning process, which could increase buy-in for the final decision, has not gotten traction with the committees so far tasked with exploring options. One challenge is that the judges, the Sheriff, the Executive and the District Attorney are all substantially autonomous, and we cannot force these parties to agree on a single plan. Some of us have felt we should do more to try.

The Board will decide in December whether to approve putting out a Request for Proposals (RFP) to design the proposed Justice Center out at the Highway Department. We would seek plans that would accommodate a phased approach, starting with the jail and adding the other facilities as need and finances dictate. Each component would be designed to be compatible with the possible later addition of the other components. Once the plans come back with a price tag we’ll have better information on how to proceed. The bar is high for the final decision: to bond for the new facility would require approval from 19 out of 25 supervisors.