Sheriff Waters wants to come up with design to combine all Duval jail facilities, then decide where new campus would be

A new jail campus is expected to cost $1 billion and could hold up to 4,000 inmates

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – The multi-million dollar renovation proposal for the Jacksonville Jaguars stadium is taking the spotlight when it comes to downtown development and the cost to taxpayers right now, but something else is also going to take a big chunk out of the city’s tax dollars in the not-to-distant future: a new jail which is expected to cost $1 billion.

From the outside, it may be hard to see the problems going on inside the Duval County Jail.

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But Darrell Meadows was just released after being in the jail for six months for a parole violation and he said not all the problems are with the physical structure of the jail. News4JAX asked Meadows about the jail and where he thinks it should move.

“I think it should be somewhere we’ll have a lot of space, but flat. And then hopefully they give us, like they have some more programs, like some more activities, they can get the inmates in and things like that. That’d be wonderful. They give more activities during the day, you know, so that we won’t be just locked up and just looking at each other and getting into trouble and stuff like that,” Meadows said.

The city council special committee looking into jail problems made its recommendation last month and suggested moving the jail to an area away from the downtown riverfront but keeping it near downtown. Sheriff T.K. Waters said before that is decided what needs to happen first is a blueprint for what the new jail would entail.

“I think we need to design it first and then locate someplace to put it,” Waters said. “If we find a place that is small and we tried to jam something in there, we found ourself in a building that would be six or seven stories, that is not ideal. What we’d like to do is have one tall building with a two-tier system in separate buildings, one for mental health check-in, one for our juveniles, one for our sentenced inmates, and one for our pretrial detainees and our in our female inmates, all separate buildings built on a system like that, and more of a campus style approach,” Waters said.

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Waters also suggested doing away with the Montgomery Correction Center, also known as the P-Farm, on the Northside, which has had flooding problems. He would like to combine all the detention faculties in Jacksonville into one area.

“I would like to be able to move the prisoner farm into that area with our sentenced inmates also...and save some fuel, save us a lot of money,” Waters said.

The cost for a new jail has been estimated to be around $1 billion.

The current jail which opened in 1991 was designed to hold 2,000 people. But it’s averaged over 2,600 a day. Waters said he would like to see a new facility that could hold up to 4,000 inmates.

A special blue ribbon committee will be formed to look at next steps.

There will be more talk, discussion and votes, but it’s possible work on a new jail could start in two to three years somewhere in Jacksonville.