The Little-Known Reason Counties Keep Building Bigger Jails: Architecture Firms

Ian Bazur-Persing was in a good place. Mental illness had dogged him for years, but by 2022, the 41-year-old was stable: settled into a sober living community in his hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, working for a lawn care company, and meditating regularly. He felt so good, in fact, that he went off his medication.  

Within weeks, he was in a state of psychosis. He and his parents sought assistance from local emergency rooms and the city’s crisis intervention team, but they couldn’t get any real help. On Christmas Eve, armed with an axe and a hunting knife, Bazur-Persing — who’d never before committed a serious crime — performed three robberies in quick succession, walking away with $610, a pair of earbuds, and a Bluetooth speaker.

He landed in the Allen County jail. No one gave him a psychological evaluation to determine his mental health status, and when Bazur-Persing’s parents, mindful of their son’s suicidal tendencies, urged medical personnel to reach out to his longtime provider about medications he might need, they refused.

“It was substandard care,” Ian’s mother, Lori Bazur-Persing, recalled. The crowded facility where her son remained for 75 days pretrial was the opposite of therapeutic. “There are no recreational facilities, no going outside. The lights are on all the time. He said it’s just terrible.”

Allen County is under a federal judge’s order to address overcrowding and poor conditions; three people have died at the jail since October. County commissioners and the sheriff would like to tear it down and build a bigger, more modern detention center with a separate mental health unit — at an estimated cost of $320 million. Some Allen County residents, however, say the current jail could simply be remodeled, with overcrowding and behavioral health issues addressed by policy changes and investments in community services instead.

The Bazur-Persings agree. “What we need is not a bigger jail, it’s a better version of the jail we have,” Tim Bazur-Persing, Ian’s father, said at a public hearing last fall.

To make the case for the new jail, county officials have repeatedly pointed to a 2022 study they commissioned, which uses three different methodologies and a bevy of graphics to illustrate that Allen County will experience a steadily rising need for jail beds over time. The current facility was designed for 732 incarcerated people and held an average of 700 in 2023; the study predicts that by 2041, the county will need space for roughly 1,500 beds.

The study wasn’t conducted by a prominent criminal justice organization or consulting company. It was done by Elevatus, a Fort Wayne-based architecture firm that has designed jails all over Indiana and in several other states. For counties that are considering expanding their current jail or building a new one, Elevatus produces feasibility studies that usually predict growing incarceration needs. In many cases, Elevatus also wins a contract to draw up the plans for the facility it recommended.

“What we need is not a bigger jail, it’s a better version of the jail we have.”

That’s what happened in Allen County. Four months after Elevatus released its study, the company was hired to design the new jail. If the county’s elected officials approve the project, the firm’s design fees — factored as a percentage of the project’s total cost, as is standard for architecture firms — could be around $10 million. (Elevatus did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, and Allen County’s commissioners declined to comment.)  

Elevatus is far from the only architecture firm creating feasibility studies and needs assessments that recommend substantially larger jails and then designing those buildings. Such blatant conflict of interest is occurring in counties all over the country, particularly in rural and conservative areas where local public safety agencies often operate with little scrutiny. These studies rely on thin data to justify spending millions of dollars in public funds. The most significant consequence, though, is that more people wind up incarcerated. As a common industry refrain goes, “If you build it, they will fill it.”

Projections Always Go Up

In public discourse about incarceration, the country’s 3,100 local jails tend to be eclipsed by prisons. That’s despite the fact that at any given moment in 2022, roughly a third of people incarcerated in the U.S. were detained in county or city jails. Seventy percent of them had not yet been convicted of any crime. Jails tend to hold people for shorter periods and see many return visitors; between July 2021 and June 2022, jail facilities around the nation recorded 7.3 million admissions.

While prison and big urban jail populations have declined in recent years, those numbers have swelled in more rural counties due to state and federal prisoners being sent to county facilities and an increased use of pretrial detention. Many jails are at capacity or overcrowded (defined as more than 80 percent full) and may be decades old and in serious disrepair.   

Commissioners and other elected officials considering expansion frequently turn to architecture firms that specialize in detention facilities to predict how many jail beds they’ll need down the line. In some states, the studies are mandated by law, and the companies are viewed as experts. Requests for study proposals rarely preclude the winning firms from later designing the facilities.

Most of the reports include legitimate design products like architectural drawings and space studies. Some also present pages of graphs and charts showing who has been in custody, when, why, and for how long. But the studies rarely analyze the bulk of that data to determine future incarceration trends; instead, most ground their projections solely on past population or incarceration numbers, seemingly undergirded by the maxim that crime will always get worse.

“The projections can be based on really problematic data,” said Beatrice Halbach-Singh, a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice. For example, a feasibility study might take a jail’s population on a single day and extrapolate 30 years into the future. “It’s been shown time and time again that assessments and projections don’t match what actually happens.”

And even when an analysis shows crime or incarceration rates going down, she added, “a study will still recommend bigger facilities. They’ll say they need room to grow.”

That was the case in Genesee County, New York, where the existing 87-bed jail was routinely at or over capacity. In 2018, commissioners hired SMRT Architects and Engineers, out of Portland, Maine, to assess the county’s incarceration needs for the next 20 years. According to the firm’s report, crime had dipped in the past four years, and the county’s population was predicted to decline in the future. Nonetheless, the firm concluded that the jail would require 184 beds by 2042. County commissioners subsequently hired SMRT to design a new $70 million facility at just that size; construction is slated to be completed later this year.

In 2018, the Indiana-based architecture company RQAW wrote a feasibility study recommending that the state’s Vanderburgh County beef up its 540-bed jail with space for 900 to 1,200 additional people. Those numbers — and their $45 million price tag — may have been too much for the small county, which is now building a 158-bed expansion with a different architect.

And in 2022, Minneapolis-based Klein McCarthy Architects created a needs assessment for Cass County, North Dakota, that averaged the results of four methodologies to determine that the 348-bed facility would need to increase to 524 beds to meet the demands of the next 20 years. The report warned, however, “There is no commonly accepted methodology for making inmate population projections.” Klein McCarthy was unanimously selected by county commissioners to design the project, and the $30 million expansion is currently underway.

The report’s seemingly off-the-cuff observation was on target. Despite some architects’ stated rule of thumb that jails need three or four beds for every 1,000 people in the county, there is no formula that can predict future incarceration needs. And the Cass County Commission doesn’t seem to mind that. “Nothing is perfect. I don’t expect accuracy, just get us close,” said Chad Peterson, chair of the Cass County Board of Commissioners and a trained architect. He added that the county considered proposals from other firms, but that Klein McCarthy’s bid had the lowest cost. (Officials in Genesee and Vanderburgh counties did not respond to requests for comment.)

What does predict needs are laws and actions — and those can make the numbers go down as well as up.

“Who’s in jail is a product of the policies and practices of that criminal justice system,” said David Bennett, a consultant for the National Institute of Corrections, or NIC, a wing of the Federal Bureau of Prisons. “There’s no correlation between crime and incarceration rates. Until you examine data and operations, you’re not doing good planning. You’ll just have a bigger, more overcrowded jail.”

“Who’s in jail is a product of the policies and practices of that criminal justice system.”

Bennett has been focused on jail capacity planning since the 1970s and wrote the NIC’s Jail Capacity Planning Guide. The publication explains how to address overcrowding systemically by examining the disparate elements of a county’s criminal justice system that can affect incarceration numbers, including bail requirements, case processing times, diversion options, and sentencing mandates. Just about every local criminal justice system could keep more people out of jail who don’t need to be there, he said.

“With some exceptions, good planning isn’t done by architects,” Bennett said. “They don’t have the background and training. They don’t understand the criminal justice system and its intricacies.” Architects’ solutions to problems tend to be built structures. And if they benefit financially from designing larger jails, recommending that counties shrink them isn’t in their interest.

For county commissioners and sheriffs, there aren’t many alternatives to using architecture firms. The NIC offers free comprehensive jail and justice system assessments, but the service isn’t well known. And only a handful of other consultants around the country perform comprehensive evaluations.

Architects, though, are easy to come by.

Lucrative but Opaque

Firms that design detention facilities, police stations, and courthouses have dubbed themselves the “justice architecture” sector. The companies — some large and well-established, earning eight-figure annual revenues from the work — are all over the country, but the field isn’t particularly competitive. In Indiana, for example, which has been experiencing a major boom in jail construction since 2015, three companies — Elevatus, RQAW, and DLZ — have designed 90 percent of the state’s recent projects.  

While the word “architect” might conjure images of soaring ceilings and big windows, very few of the firms working on jails are creating innovative designs. The work is extremely specialized, but detention facilities tend to be very similar to one another; some companies have prototype jail plans they tweak for different customers.

Nonetheless, the field is profitable. Citizens tend to agree that their county needs a decent, secure jail, but few pay close attention to the public finance tools like bonds and taxes that pay for it. The costs are so giant that differences appear almost meaningless. With payments spread over 30 years, the distinction between a $50 million bond and a $60 million bond can seem trifling.    

It’s also a remarkably opaque sector. Few of the practitioners The Intercept contacted responded, and academics and advocates had little to offer. The American Institute of Architects, the field’s professional association, which runs the Academy of Architecture for Justice, a networking and continuing education committee, declined to comment for this story.    

Detention facilities tend to be very similar to one another; some companies have prototype jail plans they tweak for different customers.

The justice architecture field briefly surfaced in the news in late 2020 after a longtime campaign to limit architects’ involvement in human rights violations finally succeeded. AIA changed its code of ethics to bar members from designing spaces meant for execution or long-term solitary confinement. The organization’s New York chapter went further, calling on its members to refrain from designing any spaces of incarceration. At least one justice architecture firm backed away from the work in response.

The rule change doesn’t appear to be enforced. For example, new jail facilities include spaces for solitary confinement, which is considered torture when it exceeds 15 days. “We don’t have data on how many people are held for 15 days or more, though based on anecdotal information, we know it isn’t unusual,” said Jean Casella, director of Solitary Watch, a group that advocates against solitary confinement. Nonetheless, a majority of principals and lead architects in companies designing detention facilities are AIA members.

Like any other industry, the leaders of justice architecture firms cultivate relationships, sponsor affiliated conferences (“We are proud to continue to be a Badger State Sheriffs’ Association gold sponsor at the Q2 Training Conference” read one company’s Facebook post), and donate politically. In Allen County, both Elevatus and DLZ — the companies as well as their individual leaders — contributed handsomely to the sheriff’s and county commissioners’ campaigns in 2021 and 2022, campaign finance reports reveal.

Some firms now host citizen meetings and create websites touting potential jail development, particularly if the project requires public approval. In Greene County, Ohio, justice architecture giant HDR was paid not only to create a needs assessment, but also to monitor the social media activity of local opponents of a new jail. News of that surveillance later cost HDR the design job, but voters eventually approved the jail anyway.

“If You Build It, They Will Fill It”

Sometimes architects are the cheerleaders for a new, expanded jail and bring the county’s policymakers around. Often, however, elected officials — particularly sheriffs — want something bigger, and the design firms are simply justifying the desired bed increases.  

Maybe the sheriff wants to add mental health and programming facilities to better address the needs of people in custody, a trend that, conveniently for architecture firms, requires substantial new construction. Or perhaps the sheriff is hoping to earn revenue by renting out extra beds to nearby counties or to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the U.S. Marshals Service, or the federal government. (That may or may not work. Those plans are vulnerable to policy changes and don’t always produce the projected profits.)  

Most of all, local officials likely want to add enough beds so that they don’t have to go through the process again anytime soon. Jail construction can be a Herculean task that takes years, as land acquisitions fall through, bond referendums fail, and county commissioners turn over. Officials reason they might as well add enough space to last another 20 or 30 years.

As the NIC’s Jail Planning guide states, “beds have a tendency to be filled,” in the same way that traffic actually increases when a highway is widened. Law enforcement officials and judges who were forced to seek alternatives for low-level offenders when a facility was full no longer have an incentive to keep people out or shorten their stays when the jail’s capacity expands. In Hancock County, Indiana, after a new jail more than doubled the number of beds available, a headline read, “Hancock County Jail fully open; inmate numbers on the rise.”

Experts like the NIC’s Bennett emphasize that the real way to reduce jail overcrowding is through policy, especially at the local level. Sheriffs have great discretion over how minor infractions are treated, who gets released on their own recognizance, and whether failure-to-appear warrants are called in. Changes like these were implemented during the pandemic, and jail populations dropped precipitously, with little downside.

Researchers agree that behavioral health problems, which are disproportionately experienced by incarcerated individuals, are best addressed in a community setting, not in jail. Treating people who struggle with mental illness or substance abuse elsewhere could radically reduce a jail population. And the expense could be far less than the many millions a new jail costs to design, build, and operate.

In some communities, grassroots coalitions opposing the construction of bigger jails are now scrutinizing architects’ feasibility studies. In California, for example, Decarcerate Sacramento succeeded in pausing an almost $1 billion jail expansion project while officials commissioned a third-party review of a justice architecture firm’s studies. In Berks County, Pennsylvania, another citizen-led group organized residents and forced a yearlong break in talks about a larger jail.

Back in Allen County, Indiana, Help Not Handcuffs is organizing against the jail. “Our stance has been, let’s figure out how to keep the jail where it is. Reduce the population and renovate the jail at a fraction of the cost of the proposed one, saving $200 million of taxpayers’ money,” said Emmanuel Ortiz, the coalition’s coordinator. “Nonviolent offenders, drug problems, people having mental health crises — that’s been a guidepost for our efforts, how to get people out of the jail.”

If reforms like those had been made two years ago, Ian Bazur-Persing may have gotten the mental health treatment he needed. Instead, he’s serving 15 years in an Indiana state prison.