NATCHEZ — Adams County Sheriff Chuck Mayfield said he and other members of his administration would be meeting with Benchmark, a company that completes feasibility studies and tailors financing plans for prison systems.

“Benchmark will come in and talk to us, do the feasibility study and compare what we are paying in maintenance and upkeep now as to what building a new one would cost and (the study) is free – you are under no obligation to give them a contract once it is completed,” Mayfield said.

The supervisors have said they are willing to hear the study, but at the time were not willing to obligate the county to any future building project without serious consideration.

While no commitments to a new facility have been made yet, Mayfield says his hunch is that a new jail and sheriff’s office administration building to replace the current building on State Street, which was built in 1973, will ultimately be needed.

Bad plumbing, a shifting structure and too little space are all daily woes the sheriff’s office has to deal with in the current building on State Street, he said.

“When they built this building, it was pretty much built to house the staff they had then, which was about one-third of what we have now,” Mayfield said. “I don’t think that they could have anticipated the kind and amount of drug crime we have now and how many prisoners we would have to house.”

When the sheriff first floated the idea of a new jail to the county board of supervisors, Mayfield said he wasn’t sure that the cost of maintaining the jail wouldn’t ultimately be more than the cost of building a new one in the long run.

While the sheriff’s office and the county administration were not able to pin an exact amount for total maintenance costs for the jail, Adams County Maintenance Department Manager Johnny Williams said the jail consumes by far the most money from the county maintenance budget, between $15,000 and $20,000 annually.

But where the building can really consume resources is in man-hours.

“It isn’t as bad as it used to be, but it is still an every other day event that I have to go over there and do something,” Williams said. “They do a walk through every day and do an inspection with a checklist, and when I go in it usually takes half a day.”

County Administrator Joe Murray said regardless of what the county has to do about the jail, he believes the facility may need a full-time maintenance person.

“If you had a brand spanking new jail, you are going to have lights that go out and pipes that break,” Murray said. “Even people who have a five-year-old house, your pipes are going to leak. It is impossible to have a building like that that houses dozens of people that doesn’t have maintenance issues, and prisoners aren’t trying to take care of the thing — they are sure not taking care of it like it was their own home.”

Structural issues

As the building has settled through the years, the pressure of its own weight has forced cracks into the outer walls, which allows moisture into the building, contributing to both mold problems and even more degradation of the wall itself, jail administrator Ed Tucker said.

The building was built before moisture barriers to protect walls were a normal part of construction, he said

“If you look at pretty much every wall on the building, you will see the mortar popping out and it is starting to push bricks out,” Tucker said. “The whole building is starting to waver — the exterior deterioration over the last couple of years seems to be faster.”

Inside, the problems are different. When the jail was built, the necessary ventilation systems weren’t installed, and so all moisture that enters the building just lingers.

“Whenever the inmates take a shower, we don’t have a ventilation system to pull that mist out and so it just hangs around, and it doesn’t take long for mold to start to form,” Tucker said.

Rain likewise introduces more moisture into the building through the cracks and separations in the walls, he said.

“After a rain, we have to continuously come in with 50-50 bleach to clean,” Tucker said. “We’ve been having daily rains lately, and we’ve been having to do that almost daily.”

As time has passed, the steel plumbing that was installed with the building has started to corrode, and the pipes leak often, Mayfield said.

“Once, they cut off the water main into the entire building, and once the pressure was gone from the system, the old steel valves relaxed and dumped all the water into the building,” Mayfield said. “And we’re not talking about the clean, clear water.”

The design of the building itself, with all of the plumbing in the central walls, also lends itself to maintenance issues, Williams said.

“It takes a long time to fix a problem for the simple fact that when they built the jail, they didn’t leave any room to work,” Williams said. “You have to crawl up against the wall and sometimes you will have pipes going up over your legs and under your legs, and sometimes you are working blind — a lot of times I have to use a mirror to see what I am doing.”

Williams said he likewise spends a lot of time having locks and door motors fixed.

Other concerns

When the jail was built, it was built to the correctional standards of the times. But Mayfield said someone building a correctional facility would no longer use the four-floor system of the current jail, which has a basement with kitchen and laundry, inmate medical and processing on the ground floor and two floors that can house a maximum of 75 inmates each.

“For its time it was probably fine, but one thing have to take into consideration for the future is having to expand, and you can’t build more levels on it,” Mayfield said “It was fine for the time, but they didn’t plan ahead for the future.”

The ground floor layout is particularly problematic, Tucker said, with hallways being used for inmate booking and processing having to also be used for long-term inmate foot traffic as they are being moved through the building during the course of the day. The tiny medical area — a re-appropriated commissary — has the same problem.

“The way you lay the floor out and the way you construct a jail has to be conducive to how you do business,” Tucker said. “We need that.”

The ground floor’s two padded holding cells — which the county is budgeting to spend $16,000 to repair next year — are also not enough, Tucker said. Instead, he said the jail needs two holding cells and four padded cells capable of holding those booked for lunacy while they await transport to the state hospital.

Solutions?

Mayfield said he did not think a consolidated city-county lockup would be a good fit for what is needed due to the fact that the Natchez city jail is a holding facility while the county jail is for longer-term prisoners awaiting trial.

“They only hold them (at the Natchez jail) for when they send them to us, and I think there might be some confusion there if we did that,” Mayfield said.

“But if the feasibility study shows that it might be cost effective to do it that way, we might look at that.”

Mayfield said any new jail facility would likely be built in an area that would allow for future expansion, and would be constructed in a manner similar to the Adams County Correctional Center, the federal immigration prison in northern Adams County, by using interlocking prefabricated pods.

The jail would likely be single-story buildings, and — if possible — could incorporate the Adams County Justice Court to eliminate having to move inmates outside the prison for arraignments and preliminary hearings, Mayfield said.

The sheriff’s office could at the same time add needed offices and storage space and provide an office for Natchez-Adams County Metro Narcotics, he said.

But first, it’s a matter of crunching the numbers.

“It’s not costing us anything for (Benchmark) to come in and do the work, so we’ll see what they say first,” Mayfield said.