New Detention Center on Schedule to Open in November
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
On Friday, in the conference room of Anderson County historic courthouse, they talk about the jail the way Southerners talk about the weather—lightly at first, with a joke, before circling around to the potentially good news most have been hoping for more than a year.
In a slideshow, the new $83 million Anderson County Detention Center (which is coming in ahead of schedule and potentially under budget), now on track to open before Thanksgiving, appears at the meeting as a drone photograph, a wide mechanical eye taking in a project that has become, in its way, the county’s most elaborate confession. The public will enter through a lobby whose drywall looks ordinary but isn’t; it is bulletproof, a modern concession to the reality that violence is no longer presumed to be on just one side of the glass. Down the corridor, a bond court and magistrate’s courtroom wait in the studs and wiring, promised as the place where the quickest decisions about freedom and confinement will be made before breakfast.
The tour moves briskly: booking, where people arrive not as citizens but as “residents”; the holding cells; the laundry rooms staked out for industrial washers and dryers; the kitchen, oversized enough to feed a thousand in a jail that is, for now, designed for 640. Two walk-in coolers, one freezer, and a long sweep of future cooking equipment offer the quiet suggestion that Anderson County expects, for the foreseeable future, a steady appetite for incarceration.
Behind the walls, there are systems intended to solve problems most people prefer not to imagine. A bar screen will catch the batteries, bags, and bottles that desperate or bored inmates send swirling toward the sewer, squeezing the contraband out so that only what is “supposed” to go to the treatment plant will get there. Elevators, already installed, promise a kind of vertical order to lives that, once inside, will move mostly in circles.
The cells themselves, prefabricated steel boxes, have a strange, utilitarian symmetry: two bunks, a small table, two stools bolted to the floor, a combined stainless-steel toilet and sink. The handicap cells, with a single bed and single chair, look almost monastic by comparison. Behind each row is a “chase,” the hidden corridor where the plumbing and mechanical lines run, a reminder that the functioning of the place depends as much on unseen routes as on the visible tiers and catwalks. In every block, narrow windows high on the wall gesture toward the outdoors; even the recreation yards are framed in concrete and steel, with slivers of sky carefully measured into the design.
On paper, the new jail solves a crisis that has been building since Eisenhower was in office. The existing detention center, erected in 1956, was built for 247 bodies; on one recent morning, the head count stood at 505, and the jail has peaked at 575—numbers that move beyond policy into physics. After 300, the man who runs the jail, Anderson County Sheriff’s Office’s Capt. David Baker, notes that with such overcrowding, you are no longer looking for beds, you are looking for floor space. At 575, the floor itself runs out. People lie in what used to be mop closets, retrofitted into cells by the simple expedients of plumbing, concrete, and a steel door: an architecture of improvisation masquerading as permanence.
The new facility, with its 640 “heads in beds,” is touted as a kind of engineered relief—no one, they say with some pride, will sleep on the floor. But the numbers have a way of leaning forward. Isolation cells quietly hold two bunks instead of one, on the theory that what is designated as single-occupancy today can, with time and the right conversation with the state, become something else. One administrator allows that, with creative use of the existing footprint and double-bunking rules, they can probably edge toward 700. The front-of-house—the kitchen, intake, laundry—has already been built to handle a thousand.
The jail is not merely a warehouse; it is also, increasingly, a school and a clinic, or the county’s approximation of both. There is a multipurpose room set aside for programs, but the true classroom will be a fleet of tablets, glowing rectangles capable of delivering GED coursework to every inmate at once, turning a place historically constrained by space into a diffuse, digital campus. Where education was once limited to “five or six at a time,” the new system promises instruction for the entire population, with proctored testing squeezed into some carefully secured corner.
Mental health, which arrives at the jail in the form of undiagnosed illness, missed medication, and long-ignored breaks with reality, is given its own line item in the new order. The county has added a behavioral and mental-health specialist under its medical contract, an acknowledgment that what is being managed here is not only crime but a loose confederation of crises. Yet even this expansion is discussed in the language of budgets and contracts—an upgraded service, to be “beefed up” if someone else can be persuaded to pick up the tab.
Staffing, too, has been rationalized into a system. Seventeen new officers this fiscal year, more to come, plus twenty civilians, who will sit in control rooms, watching cameras and operating doors, supervised by a single corporal-ranked detention officer. This is presented as prudent governance: civilians cost less, and their retirement obligations are cheaper. The jail, designed for 240 inmates and a modest staff in the middle of the last century, is becoming, in the early years of this one, a small city state of workers and watched, arranged for maximum coverage with minimum expense.
If the new building is the county’s largest single expenditure, it is also its most ambitious financial instrument. There is talk of federal prisoners, of contracts and per diem rates, of earmarking a 48-bed unit for men and a 12-bed unit for women from the U.S. Marshals Service, of how those checks might help “pay this bond” and relieve the pressure on local taxpayers. Other counties, less fortunate or less willing to build, have had to reclaim the beds they once rented to the federal government, filling them now with their own overflow. Anderson, by contrast, has built for the future, and the future they imagine is crowded.
On the regulatory side, the county has courted the Department of Corrections, inviting inspectors and planners into the process early, asking, for example, exactly how high the shower walls must be to satisfy the Prison Rape Elimination Act. The walls have been raised accordingly, to prevent guards or other inmates from seeing naked bodies, an architectural adjustment mandated by a federal law that recognizes how difficult it is to legislate what happens when too many people live too closely together.
The schedule is recited with the satisfaction of people who have finally caught a break: construction complete in early June, punch list by midsummer, inspections to follow, staff training, keys handed over in mid-November, inmates—if all goes to plan—settled into their new bunks by Christmas. The project, almost unbelievably, is said to be on time and within budget, thanks in part to a contractor who ordered HVAC units, boilers, and hot-water systems before tariffs could catch up with them. In an era of chronic delay, the notion of a jail arriving early feels, in the room, like a small civic miracle.
What no one quite says aloud, is that the new detention center is less an answer than a reprieve. The jail solves the problem of where to put the bodies that the courts and the streets send its way; it does not decide why there are so many, or what might be done to ensure that the kitchen’s capacity for a thousand meals a day remains theoretical. In a year or two, when the bunks are full and the tablet screens glow in every cell, someone will note that the building has done everything it was promised to do. The question, then, will be what Anderson County asks of itself next.
