After months of talks, Warren County officials are close to finalizing plans for expanding the county jail.The jail has been dealing with significant overcrowding since last year, Sheriff Kevin Harrison said. The plan to address that concern is to convert the sheriff’s administrative offices into new jail space, and build new offices for the sheriff’s department in the basement below.The county’s current courthouse and jail building was constructed in 1997. The jail takes up about half of the second floor and a quarter of the ground floor, with the sheriff’s offices occupying the adjacent quarter.The facility was built to house 106 inmates. Since the beginning of this year, the lowest daily population has been 109, Harrison said, while the highest has been 161.When the jail is overpopulated, inmates sleep on hard, plastic beds with mattresses on the floor, many of which are placed in cells meant for only two people, the sheriff explained.“While that allows us to handle those capacities, the problem is just the overcrowding and the proximity,” Harrison said. “When you put people who don’t know each other, who don’t like each other, that close together, tempers flare.”There also are a greater amount of already violent inmates getting arrested and jailed, exacerbating the tensions caused by overcrowding, Harrison said.The sheriff added that even jail staff have become targets of violence since the beginning of this year, with almost weekly incidents.At least one inmate is facing additional felony charges after attempting to strangle a detention officer in July.Harrison explained that expanding the jail will allow for better control of the inmate population by adding several more isolated cells for the most violent inmates, while also adding a significant amount of open dorm space for cooperative inmates.The sheriff said he hopes the expansion will also give crews a chance to address problems that were caused by cost cutting when the original facility was built. An especially onerous fact of life for the last 20 years is that inmates have the ability to intentionally flood the facility because of a lack of drains or water valve controls, Harrison said. A renovation and expansion would be the time to install new drains and electronic systems to prevent flooding toilets or showers, he said.Dozens more bedsTo open space on the ground floor for the jail, crews will first have to build the sheriff department’s new offices in the basement of the courthouse. Once the offices have been moved, two dormitories and seven cells can be built in the vacated space, said project architect Sharon Schmitz of Treanor Architects.The dorms would be designed for 20 beds and 12 beds, respectively, Schmitz said. More portable beds could be added if necessary.Five cells in a row along the west wall of the building would be for one or two people, while two cells would be padded for inmates at risk of harming themselves, Schmitz explained.New steel security walls will have to be installed around the entirety of what used to be the sheriff’s offices to create a secure housing facility, Schmitz added. Bars will have to be added to the ground floor windows and ventilation shaft large enough for a small person.After that, Harrison said the only way in or out of the new wing of the jail will be via secure stairs and elevator that only the sheriff’s department has access to within the existing jail structure.Harrison said the larger of the two new dorms likely would be used to house the jail’s growing female population, which has become much more numerous than in the past. The smaller cells will be intended as isolation units for the most problematic inmates, he said.Even after adding more than 40 new beds, the expanded facility will be at capacity from day one, Harrison said.But, he said, “nobody is triple-bunked and nobody is on the floor.”The architectural schematics will need to be reviewed by an engineer, but can be ready to send out for bids before the end of this year, Schmitz said.But first, county officials need to answer one important question posed by project manager Nick Smith of Septagon: Would it be more efficient to simply build the second level of the jail in the basement and leave the ground floor for just the sheriff’s office?County officials took the position that every option is worth considering, but said there would be several concerns with putting a jail underground. Chief among them is a complete lack of sunlight, which could aggravate existing tensions among the inmates.Officials hope to resolve that question quickly within the coming weeks. If the Warren County Commission gives the go-ahead on the current expansion plan, construction likely would start by early next year. If officials change course and decide to build jail housing in the basement, it would mean a reset on the planning process and possibly several more months before reaching this stage again.Warren County Courthouse and Jail