The Limestone County Detention Center will soon have a new health care unit to help expand capacity with the influx of inmates dealing with mental health and other medical issues. Earlier this week, the Limestone County Commission approved an agreement with PH&J Architects for architectural and engineering services for the new health care unit.
Sheriff Joshua McLaughlin and Jail Administrator Captain Tammy Waddell sat down with The News Courier to talk about the tremendous need for the new unit.
“We are very thankful that the County Commission has worked with us to get it done. It’s been a long time needed, and we are excited to get it for sure,” McLaughlin said. “We are having to utilize other cells for medical purposes or mental health; this will free up those cells.”
Waddell said, “There is a part of the jail that was not completed when we did the original expansion. We requested the county to add additional beds for us, because we are having a lot of mental health and medical inmates. So, they were able to use the ARPA funds to build out cells for medical because of COVID and those types of things.”
McLaughlin and Waddell were both relieved to know that ARPA money would be used to fund the expansion project. They described it as “huge, considering the original facility was built with monies put on everybody’s utility bills.
“We have all been paying on our utility bills, so the fact we were able to work this expansion into using those ARPA funds meant you and I, as taxpayers, didn’t have to keep going back and adding to our utilities,” Waddell said.
The jail expansion being for a health care unit is one of the reasons why the project qualified for ARPA funds. The new health care unit is something Waddell believes is a great need, as jails continue to face the state’s mental health crisis.
She said, “We have a great need for those types of things anyway. A lot of times we have to use cells in our booking area, because we have the suicide watches, quarantines, and the mentally unstable who can’t be out with anyone at that time. That’s what we are doing, taking that area that we had for expansion and turning it into a health care unit.
“It’s not a hospital, but it is for people who need more medical attention. They will be more closely supervised. It will be your special medical cases.”
Currently, the jail has one cell in medical and a small isolation area, for a total of five cells for medical. Waddell said that was an oversight when the jail was built, explaining the thought is typically about housing criminals and not always about the special cases.
“When we built this jail, knowing that at that time we could house 288, it was like we could never have more than five sick people we might want to isolate. Now, we know better. We added additional cells in either 2014 or 2015 that were 12 more additional one-man cells,” Waddell said. “Now that we have become the dumping ground for the mentally ill and COVID came along, there came a need for additional medical cells.
“As we have evolved, special cases have become who we are. The State of Alabama has no mental health facilities for the folks who are awaiting any types of trials. … You have so many people who should be getting mental health care that there is no place for them to go. Law enforcement doesn’t have a choice but to bring them to jail for the safety of the public and the person.
“Once again, here we are building units for the mentally ill because the State of Alabama refuses to take care of the mentally ill.”
The health care unit will also help keep illness from spreading in the jail with innovative features.
Waddell explained, “If we have someone that comes in with a condition — I will use TB as an example — if you needed where the air doesn’t filter back out to anyone else, that it cleans it as comes in and goes back out so that you don’t have the spread of any things like that. We are also looking at the ultraviolet lighting, because that has been proven recently that it kills more bacteria. COVID put an interest in those types of studies. As you do new things, you look for all those new types of lighting and stuff that kills airborne things. We are going to make sure we do our homework and put something in that minimizes the risk of disease being spread or the carrying of bacteria.”
With the expansion, second bunks are being added to the one-man cells added during the previous expansion, allowing inmates who come in together and have the same quarantine requirements to be housed together. Maximizing the space will hopefully help ease the overcrowding, and that is extremely important for McLaughlin.
“It’s going to help us moving forward and give us a little more time before we have to figure out what we gotta do … When you don’t have anywhere to put anybody, you have to start prioritizing warrants you are executing and everything. This is really a big deal to get that many beds and be moving in the right direction … You want to be able to put the people who need to be in jail in jail,” he said. “It makes everything tough. It makes it tough for our community, us, and our officers, and just having that many people makes it hard to control.”
Waddell added, “Our goal is to always actively seek people that have warrants. That is what we are supposed to do. There has been a time where you had to tell the guys, ‘I’m not telling you not to arrest someone if you make contact with them, but please don’t go looking for them because we don’t have the space.’”
The warmer months are usually when jail capacity goes up. Waddell said going into Fall 2022 the jail was reaching the max capacity of 314 at around 290 “busting at the seams.”
This expansion is a welcome addition, but McLaughlin and Waddell know it is a matter of time before they face overcrowding again.
He said, “It’s not the first it’s been an issue. Sheriff Blakely dealt with it when I was coming into office. We were in a jail that was over 100 years old, and he had success in getting us in the facility we are. The more we grow, the more we have to do it.”