Wayne County ushered in a “new era” of criminal justice in the county with the opening of its state-of-the-art $670 million criminal justice center. (Wayne County will incur about $500 million and its development partner Bedrock will incur about $170 million of the costs.)
After more than a decade of lobbying and planning, the new one million-square-foot facility opened this month, and the leaders behind the new facility were on hand Tuesday, Sept. 3, to talk about the solutions the new center provides for the decades of lingering problems that existed at both juvenile and adult detention facilities across the county.
“[This facility] ought to satisfy the needs of both adult detention, juvenile detention, the courts, and the Wayne County prosecutor’s office. The early feedback I’ve gotten from all of them is they like the design and they like where it is. There will be some glitches, but after really 40 years of Wayne County being involved in litigation involving the detention facilities, the jails, this is a sigh of relief for me. It’s a great day,” said Wayne County Executive Warren Evans.
“I couldn’t be happier after 10 years as county executive. This is what we’ve been hoping for. I think we’ve been good stewards of the taxpayer dollars. I think we negotiated a very, very good deal in the first place. We have paid a little more than that. But nobody thought we were going to have COVID. Nobody anticipated any of those things that’s created cost overruns, but the bottom line is, they weren’t that bad. We’ll have details on them soon so everybody can look at what the ultimate costs were, but right now I’m just excited that we’re here, and we’ve got no problem paying for it. We’re doing all the right things, I think we got the right people in place, and I’m just excited to just say, we got it done.”
The center, located at 5301 Russell St. between East Warren Avenue and East Ferry Street near the I-75 Service Drive, centralizes Wayne County’s criminal justice operations in one complex with a new jail and juvenile detention center with room for more than 2,200 adult inmates and 160 juvenile inmates, along with 26 courtrooms. It sits on more than 11 acres and spans more than one million square feet across seven buildings.
Evans thanked several people who were on hand for the press conference, highlighting their contributions as paramount to the actual opening of the facility.
“For me and I can start out by thanking a ton of people – some of them, I will thank right here because they’re here now. The Wayne County Commission Chair Alisha bell, because none of this happens without the commission’s approval and the commission has been very, very supportive of the building of this facility. James Heath, who is my core counsel, has been doing double duty dealing with the construction of this place for a number of years, I can’t thank him enough,” Evans said.
“I’ve got to thank our prosecutor Kym Worthy who told me today that she likes her facility, and that’s a wonderful thing; Sheriff Raphael Washington, who obviously will be in charge of the jails. We moved probably 1,400 prisoners from the other facility to this one. That’s not an easy task. That’s a task brought with a lot of potential problems, but was done, very, very well.”
Evans said they also brought kids from the juvenile detention facility to the new juvenile detention facility and those moves also went well. “I mean, there will be issues in adjusting to a new surrounding and a new environment. But so far, we have done, I think, an excellent job,” he added.
“The chore now is to make sure that when you come in here three years from now, it looks like it does now. I’ve been around the county a long time, and detention facilities go by the wayside quickly, because they get overcrowded first, and then maintenance can’t continue to keep it the way it needs to be. And with this investment, we owe it to the taxpayers, and we owe it to the prisoners that are in the facilities to keep it state-of-the-art and to keep it in very, very good shape.”
Bell said the opening of the new facility should be a celebratory moment because it ensures a more quality facility for everyone who encounters it, from judges to youth to adult prisoners.
“We’ve worked tirelessly for the past five years at this point, but it’s well worth it. To have this new facility that’s really going to serve the public, it’s going to really be a service to the whole community. It took a lot to get here, but it’s a huge sigh of relief for all the stakeholders involved,” she said.
Evans also touched on the fact that the city “wasted $100 million” on a previous facility that never got built and was criticized by Detroiters as “the fail jail.” With the new facility, the county made a deal with Bedrock, owned by billionaire businessman Dan Gilbert, in 2018 to oversee construction of the new center in exchange for getting ownership of the downtown buildings vacated by Wayne County: The Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, adjacent jail facilities near Greektown and a former juvenile detention center.
“I want to personally thank Dan Gilbert for his input and his cooperation. I mean, there’s always owner-builder frictions, but I will say, that’s healthy, but at the end of the day, we never hit a brick wall. I could go talk to Dan. Dan could come talk to me and we got this done. We jumped every hurdle. And I think we’ve got a state-of-the-art facility here,” Evans said.
Evans elaborated on how the new facility will be extremely beneficial to the juvenile offenders housed there.
“One of the things that will really improve is reducing the size of the wards that the kids are in. Obviously, the more kids you have – and you have staff and problems and issues – the more problems, yet this is designed in a way that you have many wards on each side of it…and services are provided in the middle,” Evans said. “So, you don’t have to have 16 kids, for example, all together with the care worker. You could have eight and keep the other eight away. And it’s designed with a more of a therapeutic intervention. We have room for the counselors that should be there, we have room and the electronics to create educational opportunities. It’s much better by design, but nothing takes the place of staff doing what they’re supposed to do and having enough staff, and we will constantly work on all of those.”
He said the county still has big issues with the state, but having said that, he said the new facility is not overcrowded currently and that they are going to keep working on making the state do what it needs to do to take kids that are already adjudicated and ready to go.
“The one thing is always critical that an attention facility in the jail is, if you get overcrowded, overcrowding creates lots of problems. One of the problems that people don’t realize is it causes maintenance problems, because all of your wards and pods are full, so painters can’t come in,” Evans said.
“The cleaning people can’t come in to get the graffiti off the walls, and I think you all understand and the people who are detained here aren’t here because they want to be. They tear up stuff and when they tear up stuff, we have to be able to get in and fix it, or the whole facility will lose.”
Warren talked about how the old nine-story facility was functionally obsolete the day it opened as a 550-person facility. The day it opened, he said, there were 1,100 prisoners.
“You don’t have enough bathrooms, you don’t have enough elevators, you don’t have enough anything, so it’s critically important that we monitor things and control population, or this big of an investment is going to go down the tubes quickly, and I don’t want that to happen,” Evans said.
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“The only way we can really do that…with juveniles, in my humble opinion, unless the state decides to take its kids and do something with them, we’re always going to have the threat of overcrowd. The real fight will come the day we become overcrowded here and I’ve got to go to war with them. Because this investment of half a billion dollars of our money is not something I’m going to throw away because of kids not getting the treatment they need. Those kids, once adjudicated, are supposed to go into a treatment program elsewhere. We’re not a treatment program. We’re a temporary holding place. And when we hold kids past that, we’re doing the kids a disservice, we’re doing the facility of this service, and I think the state has to step up to the plate and work with us resolved.”
Evans said the rubber meets the road when state policies align with detention center policies in trying to implement programs that help keep the number of juvenile offenders low, and to quickly move juvenile offenders into treatment programs that help reduce the likelihood of recidivism.
“We’re trying every day. We meet regularly with the state and the other stakeholders to try to come up with policies that will allow that to happen. I mean, it’s longer than I could talk about in press conference, but we’re not fighting, but we certainly disagree on what’s in the best interest of the kids.”
In total, the new facility will have 2,200 beds in the adult facility and 160 in the juvenile facility. Evans said that when he was hired as a sheriff deputy in 1970, the old jail that’s been here for 100 years had 2,600 prisoners in it the first day he walked in. This is a state-of-the-art adult correction opened with 1,400 prisoners in it.
“So, we have room and [overcrowding] is not going to be an immediate issue. But the juvenile detention facility very well could in successive months [see issues with overcrowding] if we don’t get some policy issues worked out,” he said.
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