The Duval County jail has slowly deteriorated on Jacksonville’s Downtown waterfront for years. Mold creeps along the ceilings. Heavy rains flood parts of the facility. Often-broken elevators complicate navigation of the jail’s 12 stories. Recently, the refrigeration system failed. One clogged toilet causes all of the toilets on the floors below to follow. And despite the health problems of the population incarcerated there, the jail lacks an infirmary to care for them.
Like many American jails constructed in the late ’80s and early ’90s, Jacksonville’s was designed to take up a single city block, rising above the nearby downtown area, within walking distance of the county courthouse. And like other jails of that era, it wasn’t equipped to handle a future where the internet would become vital to the jail’s functions in processing inmates, allowing them to communicate with family and attorneys and even holding court hearings remotely.
“Because our present jail was built under the pressure to have a bigger jail, the focus was it being a place to hold people,” Public Defender Charlie Cofer said recently. “Over the last 30 years, there’s been a recognition that if we want to deal with the back end of crime, arresting people and prosecuting them, we need to also focus on the prevention of crime by dealing better with mental health and recidivism.”
During those 30 years, the city and the Sheriff’s Office fought over who should be responsible for the jail’s upkeep, resulting in today’s crisis, a former corrections director told The Tributary.
Jacksonville leaders have accepted that the John E. Goode Pre-Trial Detention Facility must be replaced. Over the last several months, many of those leaders have debated what a new jail would look like.
Should it remain downtown? Should it spread out horizontally, instead of rising as a tall tower? What technologies are necessary to embed into the design? And how can the facility be built to lessen the death toll and the costs of caring for the incarcerated population?
City Council unanimously approved $9 million worth of improvements to the current facility in January – an extra request from the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office that didn’t come until after the city had already adopted a new budget. Yet the Council still must decide if the city should spend $380 million — a conservative number that one councilman said might grow to $800 million — to build a new facility while the current one is fixed.
Activists worry that a new jail may mean a bigger jail, and a bigger jail may mean an even higher incarceration rate for the city.
It’s a theory Cofer shares. If the city builds a new jail, one expert said leaders should consider making it smaller while implementing policies aimed at reducing jail population.
During his swearing-in ceremony on June 22, Jacksonville City Council President Ron Salem listed the jail’s rebuilding and relocation as a top priority for his leadership term, which ends in June. When he spoke with The Tributary in January, that priority stood firm.
“It is a valuable piece of land for development,” he told First Coast News during this swearing-in “But that jail is over 30 years old and is really beyond its life, and it needs to be replaced.”
The jail is a mile from the Jaguars stadium, and the football organization has proposed spending $1 billion in taxpayer funding to renovate the stadium and develop a surrounding entertainment district. Salem and others have drawn a direct line between removing the jail and revitalizing the corridor east of Downtown around the stadium.
In August, Salem tasked councilmember Michael Boylan with breaking the council into five working groups that would bring in experts to learn how to best build a new facility.
The committees included groups focused on several topics including intake, adjudication, rehabilitation, health, housing and classification of inmates.
Despite instructions to ignore location or size, discussions inevitably led some members to reconsider a plot near Montgomery Correctional Center, which primarily houses individuals serving short sentences for misdemeanors. That plot is about an hour round trip drive to and from the courthouse, and it’s an hour and a half to get to and from the Beaches.
“I’m comfortable with up to 10 miles from downtown,” Councilman Jimmy Peluso told The Tributary. He’s heard concerns about moving the jail out of downtown means moving inmates away from the courthouse but he says some of those concerns are outdated. “St. Johns County, for instance, does all their first appearances via Zoom now. So that’s one thing we’re looking at. It doesn’t require us moving people around because that’s a cost and potentially dangerous.”
Cofer, who co-chairs Peluso’s committee, said jails are meant to service the courthouses, and he wants to keep it downtown, even if it’s not on the waterfront.
The working groups plan to submit their final recommendations to Salem in the coming weeks. Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters is already prepared to solicit bids from contractors, Salem said. The reports will hopefully guide him and other developers on what the city needs from its new facility.
“I think there’s a lot of people who need to be engaged to make sure we construct the right type of facility,” Salem told The Tributary. “Our families visit the jail, we need to look at visitation, health care, mental health care. I think there’s a lot of things we can do in a new facility to better treat people once they’re in jail to hopefully prevent them from coming back.”
The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office didn’t return a request for an interview.
If they build it, they’ll fill it
Geneva Pittman agreed the city needs a new jail. She hasn’t seen the inside of the downtown facility herself, but she’s heard stories about its deteriorated state.
Pittman belongs to the Interfaith Coalition for Action, Reconciliation and Empowerment group, or ICARE. The group recently discussed its members’ support for a new jail – and their concerns for how it will be used.
“A lot of people are in there because they have mental problems, and you’re being subjected to what’s going on in the jail now and that’s not helping,” she said, referring to a spike in deaths over the last six years. “For them to build a new jail, if it doesn’t take away from those who need help, that’s fine. But we don’t want to see them mistreated.”
Pittman fears that more jail beds will lead to more people arrested. ICARE has spent the last year pushing Waters to introduce an adult civil citation program, which could reduce the number of people jailed.
Under such a program, adults who would otherwise be arrested on low-level, non-violent crimes would be sent to a pre-arrest diversion program. From January 2022 through June 2023, more than 6,500 people were arrested with primary charges related to not having valid driver’s licenses, according to a review of Duval County Clerk of Court data.
In 2018, the Florida Legislature adopted a new law to specifically encourage communities to adopt civil citations and stop giving arrest records to so many people. More than a dozen Florida counties — including many of the state’s most conservative counties — have started this type of program.
In 2017, Miami-Dade County issued about 8,900 civil citations preventing incarceration for crimes such as possession of drug paraphernalia and the consumption of alcohol in public, which kept people out of jail and allowed them to go through programs designed to keep people from committing the same offenses while saving taxpayer money.
State Attorney Melissa Nelson has said she supports adult civil citations, but she also said it’s up to the sheriff to decide if he wants to implement such a program. And Sheriff Waters has vehemently opposed implementing the program. During an ICARE meeting in April last year, Waters said he doesn’t “believe in decriminalization,” saying that we should hold adults to higher standards.
Most counties have found ways to work around their limited capacities rather than expanding their jails, said Wanda Bertram of the Prison Policy Initiative.
“They find ways for people who are in pretrial to get released, more people go on probation or are given alternatives to short sentences that would be served in jail,” she said. “Police tend to understand that the jail has less capacity to work with, and they book people less often for minor offenses and they focus more on stuff that’s really dangerous in the community, which is good.”
Cofer said an adult civil citation program likely wouldn’t impact the jail population much – most people who are arrested on those crimes are either released at their initial hearing or post bond within a day.
“If we quit holding so many of these non-violent misdemeanors and non-dangerous third-degree and second-degree felonies, you can make a headway,” he said.
He sees many people stuck in jail simply because they can’t afford to pay a bond, which is the money required for release while awaiting trial. If someone follows all the rules of release and shows up to their court dates, they get their bond money back. If not, they lose that money. Often, people use bail bond services, paying a portion of the bond amount, while the service pays the rest.
The Bail Project, a nonprofit housed in the public defender’s building, helps get people released by fronting their bonds.
More than 96% of the people The Bail Project has helped release in Jacksonville were not rearrested during the term of their case, according to the nonprofit.
Those results show that defendants don’t need the fear of a financial penalty to ensure they will return to court, Cofer said
Matt Kachergus, a Jacksonville civil rights attorney, said he thinks the reason for building a new jail comes down to capacity and freeing the space for future development — not whether the jail is humane.
“They’ll say, ‘We’ll get a better medical facility. We’ll have better conditions of confinement.’ But that’s not going to be the driver. It’s going to be the population,” he said. “They’re overpopulated and they’re going to say, ‘The only way we can fix that is by building a bigger facility.’ Well, that’s not true. The way to deal with it is to get more people out on pretrial release, but that’s not going to happen.”
If the city considers building the jail near the Montgomery Correctional Center, Kachergus said council members should ask themselves what the cost of that location will be.
“Every year we’re adding tens of millions of dollars to the sheriff’s budget,” he said. “I don’t see this reducing that cost.”
Cofer echoed those sentiments – it will cost more to transport people during arrests and to and from the courthouse. He added that JSO should consider its officers who work closer to the beaches or south of downtown.
“If it’s a DUI case, and you need to have a breath test done at the jail, you’re not going to get an accurate breath test,” he said. “It takes officers regularly off the street longer. It can kill half a shift just to transport someone.”
‘Proactive approach’ to building current jail
It took 16 years of planning, research and development to create the 1991 facility, according to a U.S. Department of Justice bulletin at the time. The bulletin called the facility a “proactive approach to design and construction.”
The current jail was built after a 1975 federal court decision found that JSO’s previous jail’s conditions were so brutal that it violated the U.S. Constitution. The judge wrote that “the overall environment of the inmate housing areas of the Duval County Jail gave one the psychological feeling of being trapped in a dungeon.”
Kachergus works for the firm that represented Duval County inmates in the federal case that ultimately led to the building of the current jail.
The city commissioned 15 jail studies in a decade to determine how to handle overcrowding. The last one, in 1985, gave a recommendation to build a bigger facility, according to reporting at the time by The Florida Times-Union.
Other recommendations from that report included expanding the city’s work-release program, starting an in-house detention program and sending drug and alcohol abusers to treatment instead of jail.
That Sheriff’s Office implemented various strategies, including scheduled mass releases, to lower its inmate count. Additionally, it adopted alternative bond options and initiated a process where individuals were charged but not detained, receiving notices to appear instead. Unlike civil citations, which bypass criminal charges altogether, these notices still contain a criminal charge. Despite those efforts, the 1993 bulletin said the number of inmates continued to climb, “partly as a result of the ongoing war on illegal drugs.”
“During this period, corrections in Jacksonville came of age,” then-JSO Deputy Director Michael A. Berg wrote in the bulletin. “We were committed to finding solutions to traditional correctional problems through long-range planning and modern management techniques. We took a systems approach to finding permanent answers to existing problems. We started viewing our entire operation as a business that needed to function as efficiently and effectively as possible.”
Berg wrote that the Sheriff’s Office also used the media “to ensure positive news coverage and to keep the general public informed of the process.” Today, The Tributary – as well as other reporters from Jacksonville outlets – have asked to tour the jail, but multiple requests to the Sheriff’s Office have been ignored.
When the jail opened in April 1991, the Sheriff’s Office moved more than 1,700 inmates from seven different facilities into it. In January, the Sheriff’s Office reported, they had 2,521 pretrial inmates and 3,649 total inmates on an average day.
Each dorm in the cell can sometimes top 100 inmates, which makes it difficult to properly watch over everyone, said Tara Wildes, a former JSO corrections director.
“It becomes extremely problematic when you have behavioral issues,” she said, adding that if the city were to build a new jail, one of her recommendations would be to create smaller dorms. The ones in St. Johns County, where she now oversees the jail, holds about 24 people each.
Waterfront location
Jacksonville’s jail, a stark Brutalist structure a block from the St. Johns River, has frequently sparked debate over its downtown location ever since the city planned its original construction.
A majority of residents — 52% — said they wanted to see it relocated, according to a September 2023 University of North Florida poll.
But putting a jail near prime real estate isn’t unique to Jacksonville. Similar cities like Fort Worth, Kansas City and Nashville all placed their jails in their respective downtowns.
Peluso and Cofer visited the Davidson County jail in Nashville on separate trips. That jail’s downtown construction finished in 2019, and it houses about 1,000 adults.
“You wouldn’t even know it was a jail because of the architecture,” Cofer said. “What really stood out to me is there was a separate mental health facility that almost looked like a hospital ward. Some of the guards were in what looked like scrubs. There was sunlight and a courtyard area. It’s very relaxed.”
People with the opinion that more sunlight is coddling inmates don’t take into account the safety of officers, he added.
“If you treat people humanely, they will act humane,” he said. “It’s not coddling. It’s an overall safety [factor] and reduction of risk. There’s a design aspect where it fulfills the primary function: that’s holding the people [who] are probably the most danger[ous] to society until the disposition of their cases without it becoming this place where everybody’s [in] danger and it’s a hellhole. You can do both, so why don’t you?”
Having a more humane, modernized jail could help attract more to the job. It’s something that a working group led by Councilman Rahman Johnson has explored.
“The men and women who work in this facility, I could not be more proud of them,” he said. “We can make their jobs better.”
Everyone seems to be in agreement that building a jail horizontally instead of vertically is the right move. Wildes took that concept further: Don’t fill the facility with bunk beds, which will cut down on injuries.
And, build a facility with more spaces for programming.
“You need classrooms. You need vocational areas,” she said. “If you’re serious about making people better, you have to have … the practices and the facilities to make them better.”
How did we get here
Regardless of where a new jail goes, Peluso said the city shouldn’t ignore how the current jail’s conditions deteriorated this much in the first place. He pinned the blame on prior city administrations, who wanted to ignore the situation rather than include fixes in their budget requests, possibly diverting money from other needs.
“No one campaigns on putting millions of dollars into the jail,” he said. “Nobody gets psyched for that. Nor does anyone get elected and say, ‘This is going to be my number one priority.’ So I think, politically, it was never really something that people wanted to get engaged in.”
Wildes, the former corrections director, said some jail issues arose pretty quickly after its opening.
“The elevators never worked,” she said. “We tried to sue the elevator company for years.”
Even when the city began building the jail, officials realized they failed to include cell doors in the initial contract.
Preventative maintenance was almost never completed, she said.
“There was always a battle between the city maintenance folks and the internal maintenance folks as to who did what,” she said. “We would turn in capital improvement projects every year to try to stay ahead of the maintenance, but they were rarely approved by the city because it was the jail. So problems that could have been handled became exacerbated due to shortsightedness and neglect.”
Peluso said he is glad Sheriff Waters felt empowered to ask for millions to fix the current jail, but he was disappointed Waters waited until after the budget process ended to ask for it.
“Again, we’ve got his own correctional officers who are now in an unsafe environment, as well as the inmates that are there too,” Peluso said, emphasizing that he was happy to approve the money.
The council approved $9 million for infrastructure upgrades, which included mold remediation, upgraded workstation pods and elevator maintenance.
Peluso suggested implementing a regular assessment of the jail at least every five years to determine what maintenance and upgrades should be done so the city doesn’t find itself in a similar position moving forward.
Councilman Rahman Johnson agreed that the city should consider some form of an accountability measure.
“I think we learned enough from our past and we understand how to plan for the future,” he said. “If we plan this properly, I don’t think we’ll have to do this again in 30 years.”
Nichole Manna is The Tributary’s criminal justice reporter. You can reach her at nichole.manna@jaxtrib.org or on Twitter at @NicholeManna.