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One of Franklin County's Jail's pods, or housing units. The jail was designed by the firm L.R. Kimball, now TranSystems, a bidder in Lancaster County's new jail project.

Lancaster County’s made due with a prison on a less-than-five-acre site for 170 years. So why, then, are county officials now looking to build the new 45-acre facility on a property more than 15 times larger than the existing one?

The answer lies in the fact that experts and architects believe prisons built wide, instead of tall, enhance staff and inmate safety, require fewer staff to operate and provide ample space for programs that help keep inmates from ending up back behind bars.

Putting those priorities at the forefront, along with close proximity to the courthouse, drove county officials’ assessment of potential sites. The emphasis on space also eliminated many sites that would have restricted the facility’s footprint, county officials have said.

That includes Sunnyside Peninsula, where the county’s Youth Intervention Center sits on a 12-acre property near the land’s tip. Those concerned about a prison’s impact on nearby real estate values may have considered land near the youth center as a potential site for the new prison. The county’s current preferred site is a rare, large single piece of undeveloped waterfront property.

But a quarry and woodlands with rough terrain make up most of the undeveloped land on the Sunnyside Peninsula, creating a hurdle for development. And given the shape of the undeveloped land there, there’s no way to fit any facility close to 45 acres in size.

Wide, not tall

The design process for the new Lancaster County facility has not started, officials said. But the preliminary plans call for a much lower-to-the-ground and expansive facility across 45 acres, built out rather than up.

Warden Cheryl Steberger has said her target capacity is currently 1,250 beds, an increase from the 1,058-bed capacity of the current prison. But the current facility, which has stood at its 625 East King St. location since 1851, fits on a lot smaller than five acres.

The need is self-evident to those who have spent time at the current prison. In a May Prison Board meeting, Steberger claimed she had coined a new term: “cloffices.”

“In my medical department, I literally have people working out of a closet,” Steberger told LNP | LancasterOnline. “There’s not enough room.”

A flatter, wider building, as opposed to the five-level towers on East King Street, also solves a number of security and logistical headaches that have plagued Steberger’s staff.

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The outside of Franklin County Jail, built in 1997.

“You do want to have, if you’ve got the luxury of having land, to try to get to what is basically a one-story facility,” said Paul Swartz, senior partner and CEO at Somerville, New Jersey-based USA Architects. The firm has worked on a number of state prisons and county jails in Pennsylvania and New Jersey.

But local criminal and racial justice advocates also see the prospect of a new prison as a rare opportunity for the community to reevaluate and think through what kind of correctional facility Lancaster County wants to have for the ensuing decades.

When compared to population figures from the U.S. Census, data from the Pennsylvania Department of Corrections on county jails show Lancaster County’s incarcerated population in January of 2019 severely overrepresented Black and Latino residents.

Black residents make up 4% of the county’s total population, yet made up 20% of the jail population in 2019. Latino residents, similarly, make up 10% of the county’s population, and 24% of the county jail population.

“It will be one of our tasks to monitor the new system for demography, population count, and to advocate for prison reforms” that address mass incarceration, said Blanding Watson, president of the Lancaster NAACP, in an email.

Watson said his organization has received reports of poor living conditions at the current facility, making a new one necessary.

John Maina, CEO of a new consulting and advocacy group called Central Penn Equity Project, said his group wants be involved with the public discussion over what the new prison should look like and how big it should be. Maina is also a former correctional officer who worked at Lancaster County Prison.

The new prison’s design, he said, will have a role in maintaining or challenging the nation's dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rates in the world.

“In the short term, what we have to do is look for ways to find equity when the opportunities come,” Maina said.

The plusses of pods

The push for a new prison isn’t just to bring in the new. Ninety percent of the current prison doesn’t have air conditioning, Steberger said in a May Prison Board meeting. Office space is severely limited. Maintenance problems are constant, she said.

But the chance at a replacement also means an opportunity to move closer to long-held safety and security standards in prison design.

Beginning in the 1970s, Swartz said, officials at the Federal Bureau of Prisons pushed the “direct supervision” model of prison design. It’s now the industry standard, he said.

Instead of long corridors of cells lined up next to each other, for instance, the direct supervision model calls for cells to all face a central atrium for incarcerated people to gather and socialize or watch TV, often called the “day room.”

The day room and surrounding cells make up one unit, or pod.

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One of Franklin County Jail's pods, which each have their own visitation area.

Direct supervision also largely did away with the practice of correctional officers working behind a barrier or remotely with video cameras. Instead, many direct-supervision facilities station a correctional officer at a desk that overlooks the dayroom area, Swartz said. It allows officers to interact more with people locked up in the unit, and more quickly respond to any conflict brewing in the room before it escalates into violence.

The direct supervision model may appear to be a bit more humane than older facilities, but it’s also proven to show cost benefits.

It doesn’t require as much staff to supervise the jailed population as other models, Swartz said.

The pods create a self-contained facility for a smaller group, usually 60 or so people. Meals, visitation, bathing and other services can come to, or already be included in, the pods. That setup cuts down on the need for escorting people across different parts of the facility, Swartz said.

"You need two corrections officers to move one person, so the staffing issues become much greater,” when you frequently have to move jailed people between different areas of the facility, Swartz said.

While the circa-1991 high-rise at the current Lancaster County Prison features direct-supervision pods, Steberger said its multiple stories, lack of space and other design quirks remove some of those typical benefits.

Moving a jailed person from one place to another is a logistical headache. It requires staff to lockdown portions of the facility at a time, so jailed people from one pod don’t have a chance to interact with another, Steberger said.

This creates opportunities for individuals to move contraband or start fights, the warden said.

Since some needed services might be on a different floor, officers rely on elevators to transport jailed people, another big security risk, Steberger said.

Several correctional officers are needed for transporting jailed people on elevators, Steberger said. In addition to an officer inside the elevator, officers need to be stationed at different floors to maintain observation of just one person, Steberger said. “In a newer facility you have one or two officers stationed at one centralized location that can keep eyes on that individual” when the path to another service or area in the jail doesn’t require an elevator, she said.

‘State of the art’

Steberger pointed to the jail in Franklin County as a template what she wants to see in a new prison in Lancaster County.

The Franklin County Jail was completed in 1997, but it’s still pretty state-of-the-art, said William Bechtold, the warden there.

The 500-bed facility is made up of pods that are largely self-contained. Each has its own visitation area, its own recreation room, and heating and cooling system, Bechtold said.

The pods also allow Bechtold to sort the jailed population into appropriate groups based on safety and special needs, he said. One pod, for instance, may cater specifically to people with mental illnesses. Another could be restricted to people with nonviolent charges or convictions, who require less supervision and security, Bechtold said.

A minimum-security pod at Franklin County Jail doesn’t have doors on its cells. Bunks are out in the open, and people jailed there have more autonomy to go to the shower or recreation areas by themselves, for instance.

But perhaps the real difference maker in Franklin County, according to Bechtold, is its breadth of mental health screening and services. About 30% of the jail's population have serious mental health illnesses, Bechtold said.

The jail has instituted programming specific to arranging services for people once they leave the jail, which can be hard for people with serious mental health issues or a history of serious crimes, Bechtold said.

Steberger has promoted diversion programs and other services to give people a better chance for a stable life after incarceration, but space limitations at Lancaster County Prison have restricted the number of participants, she said.

Jean Bickmire, president at the Lancaster criminal justice reform group Have a Heart for Persons in the Criminal Justice System, said women don’t have a separate mental health pod at the Lancaster County Prison. She also called for more units for drug rehabilitation and a dedicated reentry program for people leaving the jail.

Bickmire also said the new prison should have one level, so people with mental illnesses can’t jump from a higher tier of cells to another.

The Have a Heart president said the new prison will need more bed space to appropriately move and resort the jailed population, but 1,200 beds seems like too much.

In 2012, the prison's average daily population reached 1,198. By 2019, it had fallen to 785. Today that number is closer to 700, according to Steberger.

Now that county's current prison population has fallen, having more beds could make officials compelled to fill them, Bickmire and Maina said.

Soft materials

Despite Franklin County Jail’s functionality and availability of services, its pods and facilities don’t look terribly different from a lot of other modular, pod jail designs.

But critics of the U.S. corrections system, Maina included, point to Scandanavia for examples of jails that avoid harsh, utilitarian conditions that can leave people feeling even less equipped or emotionally stable to reenter society.

“You don’t want to treat human beings like a non-sentient caged being,” Maina said.

Some new jail facilities in the U.S., like the minimum-security Maple Street Correctional Center in Redwood City, California, have increased the amount of natural light in pods, used a different color palette to make jails feel less institutional and created more appropriate seating for things like watching TV.

Swartz said atriums for natural light and softer building materials can make a facility feel more inviting, but nicer typically means more expensive. Government officials usually want to find ways to limit construction and operating costs, he said.

And while harder building materials may not look as nice, they ensure a jail maintains a longer useful life, Swartz said.

“There’s a tremendous amount of wear and tear” on correctional facilities, much like schools, Swartz said. “These are buildings that are designed to last 50 to 100 years, so you want to make sure they don’t get abused and become quickly out of date.”

A much more functional facility will also better serve jailed people with physical disabilities or chronic medical issues, Steberger said.

The prevalence of stairs in the current Lancaster County Prison has posed major problems for people there with wheelchairs, oxygen tanks and CPAP machines, according to the warden.

Steberger said there will be a process to engage the public on design plans. After many years, the warden said, the prison staff has learned intimately what the shortfalls are.

But what the ultimate solutions will be remain to be determined, she said.

“We know what we want to do, but we don't know what's out there for us to be able to do it,” Steberger said. “It's not every day you get to be a part of designing a new prison.”

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