Ian Bazur-Persing was in a good place. Mental illness had dogged him for years, but by 2022, the 41-year-old was stable: settled into a sober living community in his hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana, working for a lawn care company, and meditating regularly. He felt so good, in fact, that he went off his medication.
Within weeks, he was in a state of psychosis. He and his parents sought assistance from local emergency rooms and the city’s crisis intervention team, but they couldn’t get any real help. On Christmas Eve, armed with an axe and a hunting knife, Bazur-Persing — who’d never before committed a serious crime — performed three robberies in quick succession, walking away with $610, a pair of earbuds, and a Bluetooth speaker.
He landed in the Allen County jail. No one gave him a psychological evaluation to determine his mental health status, and when Bazur-Persing’s parents, mindful of their son’s suicidal tendencies, urged medical personnel to reach out to his longtime provider about medications he might need, they refused.
“It was substandard care,” Ian’s mother, Lori Bazur-Persing, recalled. The crowded facility where her son remained for 75 days pretrial was the opposite of therapeutic. “There are no recreational facilities, no going outside. The lights are on all the time. He said it’s just terrible.”
Allen County is under a federal judge’s order to address overcrowding and poor conditions; three people have died at the jail since October. County commissioners and the sheriff would like to tear it down and build a bigger, more modern detention center with a separate mental health unit — at an estimated cost of $320 million. Some Allen County residents, however, say the current jail could simply be remodeled, with overcrowding and behavioral health issues addressed by policy changes and investments in community services instead.
The Bazur-Persings agree. “What we need is not a bigger jail, it’s a better version of the jail we have,” Tim Bazur-Persing, Ian’s father, said at a public hearing last fall.
To make the case for the new jail, county officials have repeatedly pointed to a 2022 study they commissioned, which uses three different methodologies and a bevy of graphics to illustrate that Allen County will experience a steadily rising need for jail beds over time. The current facility was designed for 732 incarcerated people and held an average of 700 in 2023; the study predicts that by 2041, the county will need space for roughly 1,500 beds.
The study wasn’t conducted by a prominent criminal justice organization or consulting company. It was done by Elevatus, a Fort Wayne-based architecture firm that has designed jails all over Indiana and in several other states. For counties that are considering expanding their current jail or building a new one, Elevatus produces feasibility studies that usually predict growing incarceration needs. In many cases, Elevatus also wins a contract to draw up the plans for the facility it recommended.
“What we need is not a bigger jail, it’s a better version of the jail we have.”
That’s what happened in Allen County. Four months after Elevatus released its study, the company was hired to design the new jail. If the county’s elected officials approve the project, the firm’s design fees — factored as a percentage of the project’s total cost, as is standard for architecture firms — could be around $10 million. (Elevatus did not respond to The Intercept’s questions, and Allen County’s commissioners declined to comment.)
Elevatus is far from the only architecture firm creating feasibility studies and needs assessments that recommend substantially larger jails and then designing those buildings. Such blatant conflict of interest is occurring in counties all over the country, particularly in rural and conservative areas where local public safety agencies often operate with little scrutiny. These studies rely on thin data to justify spending millions of dollars in public funds. The most significant consequence, though, is that more people wind up incarcerated. As a common industry refrain goes, “If you build it, they will fill it.”
Projections Always Go Up
In public discourse about incarceration, the country’s 3,100 local jails tend to be eclipsed by prisons. That’s despite the fact that at any given moment in 2022, roughly a third of people incarcerated in the U.S. were detained in county or city jails. Seventy percent of them had not yet been convicted of any crime. Jails tend to hold people for shorter periods and see many return visitors; between July 2021 and June 2022, jail facilities around the nation recorded 7.3 million admissions.
While prison and big urban jail populations have declined in recent years, those numbers have swelled in more rural counties due to state and federal prisoners being sent to county facilities and an increased use of pretrial detention. Many jails are at capacity or overcrowded (defined as more than 80 percent full) and may be decades old and in serious disrepair.
Commissioners and other elected officials considering expansion frequently turn to architecture firms that specialize in detention facilities to predict how many jail beds they’ll need down the line. In some states, the studies are mandated by law, and the companies are viewed as experts. Requests for study proposals rarely preclude the winning firms from later designing the facilities.
Most of the reports include legitimate design products like architectural drawings and space studies. Some also present pages of graphs and charts showing who has been in custody, when, why, and for how long. But the studies rarely analyze the bulk of that data to determine future incarceration trends; instead, most ground their projections solely on past population or incarceration numbers, seemingly undergirded by the maxim that crime will always get worse.
“The projections can be based on really problematic data,” said Beatrice Halbach-Singh, a senior research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice. For example, a feasibility study might take a jail’s population on a single day and extrapolate 30 years into the future.
Repeatedly, it has been demonstrated that assessments and projections do not align with actual outcomes.
Even when a decline in crime or incarceration rates is indicated, there is still a tendency for studies to recommend larger facilities. The rationale often given is the perceived need for room to accommodate future growth.
One such example is Genesee County, New York, where despite a decrease in crime and a predicted decline in population, a report by SMRT Architects and Engineers concluded that a 184-bed jail would be necessary by 2042. This led to the construction of a new $70 million facility of that size, even though the existing 87-bed jail was already operating at or over capacity.
Similarly, a feasibility study by RQAW in 2018 recommended expanding Vanderburgh County’s 540-bed jail to accommodate 900 to 1,200 more individuals. The county ultimately decided on a smaller 158-bed expansion due to cost concerns.
In another instance, Klein McCarthy Architects projected a need for Cass County, North Dakota, to increase its 348-bed facility to 524 beds. Despite acknowledging the lack of a standardized methodology for such projections, the county unanimously selected the firm to design a $30 million expansion.
As evidenced by these cases, the accuracy of architectural projections for jail capacity is questionable. The decisions are often based on laws and policies rather than actual data, leading to costly expansions that may not align with real needs.
According to experts like David Bennett, who has studied jail capacity planning for decades, architects may not have the necessary understanding of the criminal justice system to make informed recommendations. While alternatives like comprehensive assessments from organizations like the National Institute of Corrections exist, they are underutilized in favor of architectural solutions.
The lucrative nature of designing larger jails may incentivize architecture firms to recommend unnecessary expansions, highlighting a potential conflict of interest in the justice architecture sector. Despite the availability of free resources for comprehensive evaluations, county officials often rely on architects for planning, even though their expertise may not always align with the complex needs of the criminal justice system.
Lucrative but Opaque
Companies in the justice architecture sector, which specialize in designing detention facilities, police stations, and courthouses, often generate significant revenues from their work. While these firms are prevalent across the country, the field lacks substantial competition, raising concerns about transparency and accountability in the design of justice facilities.
In Indiana, the recent boom in jail construction has been dominated by three companies – Elevatus, RQAW, and DLZ, who have collectively designed 90 percent of the state’s recent projects. Despite the specialized nature of the work, very few firms working on jails are creating innovative designs, as detention facilities tend to be similar to one another.
The costs associated with jail construction are significant, with public finance tools like bonds and taxes typically funding these projects. The distinction between different bond amounts may seem insignificant to taxpayers when spread out over a 30-year payment plan.
The justice architecture sector is largely opaque, with few practitioners and professional associations willing to comment. While there have been efforts to limit architects’ involvement in human rights violations, such as designing spaces for execution or long-term solitary confinement, enforcement of these rules remains unclear.
Architects in this field often build relationships with policymakers, sponsor conferences, and engage in political donations. Some firms even monitor social media activity of local opponents in communities where new jail projects are proposed.
The tendency for new jail beds to be filled once constructed has led to significant expansion in many areas, driven in part by the desire to generate revenue by renting out extra beds. However, experts argue that reducing jail overcrowding should involve policy changes at the local level, focusing on alternatives to incarceration for low-level offenders.
Addressing behavioral health problems in community settings rather than jails could be a more effective and cost-efficient approach. Grassroots coalitions in some communities are now challenging the feasibility studies of architects proposing larger jail projects, leading to a pause in some expansion plans. In Berks County, Pennsylvania, a local organization led by citizens successfully halted discussions about building a larger jail for a year. This group mobilized residents to advocate for alternative solutions to incarceration.
Meanwhile, in Allen County, Indiana, Help Not Handcuffs is actively campaigning against the construction of a new jail. Their focus is on reducing the incarcerated population, renovating existing facilities, and saving taxpayers millions of dollars. The coalition emphasizes the need to address nonviolent offenses, drug addiction, and mental health crises to prevent unnecessary incarceration.
Had similar reforms been implemented earlier, individuals like Ian Bazur-Persing might have received the mental health support they needed to avoid imprisonment. Instead, Ian is currently serving a 15-year sentence in an Indiana state prison.
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