- November 18, 2024
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Flagler County’s new inmate facility will gain 272 beds through an expansion effort slated to begin in September and end in January 2016.
The project will use the existing jail and add new buildings, an option County Administrator Craig Coffey said let the county get “a lot more space with a lot less money.”
“It’s really going to help your expansion plans,” he told county commissioners at a workshop May 20. “You have better and more cells, better segregation, better flow.”
Allstate Construction Group Project Manager Glenn Deaver said using the existing building during the initial phase will save $1.2 million to $1.7 million. “When we were building segregation areas brand new, those were high-dollar areas. They’re reinforced, they have a lot of security electronics — you already have a lot of that in place,” he said.
The initial phase of the project will involve adding a support facilities building, video visitation capabilities and a new, 272-bed octagonal “housing pod.”
Later project phases could add two larger multistory buildings, each of them able to accommodate up to 512 inmates.
Commissioner Chairman George Hanns asked Deaver about the new facilities’ ability to separate inmates, relating a time he’d visited the jail and “was horrified to learn of the fact that one girl was arrested for driving without a license and had no bond money, and the person they were with was someone that was accused of a much more serious crime.”
Deaver said each new housing structure will contain 12 subdivisions, a design that will allow the county to “avoid a lot of the things that would violate (the Prison Rape Elimination Act).”
Cells in the octagonal “housing pods” would be arranged around the outside of the octagon, viewable from a control structure in the center. Windows in the cells would look out onto recreation areas.
The individual cells will be precast in concrete and designed so that all plumbing and electrical work could be done from the outside, without workers ever entering a cell.
Deaver said the first, 272-bed phase of the project should fit the county’s needs for about 25-35 years. Subsequent phases would add another 50-75 years of life to the facility, he said.
