Faced with overcrowding at the juvenile detention center and a near-capacity population at its problem-plagued jail, Lake County prosecutors and judges have had to improvise to come up with alternatives to incarceration.
Fortunately for Lake County authorities, the penal problems come up at a time when serious crime has been down.
The jail problems resurfaced last week when the Lake County Building Commission sued the architects and contractors who built the Babcox Justice Center, which houses the jail. This follows by a month a state report citing the Hulse Juvenile Detention Center for plumbing deficiencies at that overcrowded facility.
Not content to depend on a flat crime rate to solve the jails’ problems, Lake County State’s Atty. Michael Waller’s office has undertaken several measures recently to limit the number of prisoners at the county’s jails.
“We have found that some people can be dealt with outside jail,” Waller said Friday. For instance, some inmates who might have bond set by a judge over the weekend might have their bond lowered or be let out on a personal recognizance bond after review by the regular bond court judge.
In addition, Waller said, some defendants can be released from jail to attend drug rehabilitation programs.
And at the Hulse Center, Waller said, authorities sometimes have to make a tough draw to ease overcrowding when they can find nowhere else to ship them.
“If there is no room for someone elsewhere and the Hulse Center is at capacity, the judge might have to let an auto thief out to make room for an armed robber,” Waller said.
The problems at the jail came into focus again Thursday in the lawsuit over the $27 million Babcox Justice Center.
The seven-count suit accuses seven firms of designing and constructing a faulty building, and it seeks $210,000 in damages, plus whatever other costs a judge or a jury may deem appropriate to repair the problems.
The building commission isn’t sure how much it will cost to fix the leaks and other flaws at the 5-year-old building, such as cracking floors and walls. Building commission attorney Rudolph Magna said the county is examining the damage, and officials expect to begin letting bids for repairs later this year.
The local architect, Legat Architects Inc., of Waukegan, denies any flaw in its design. Legat’s partner in the jail complex project, Phillips Swager Associates of Peoria, said last week that the complaints in the suit were the first it had heard from the county since the facility opened in March 1989.
Several contractors blamed a now-defunct company whose assets they bought. Another denied blame for any of the problems, saying that other contractors were responsible for any flaws.
Sheriff Clinton Grinnell says that the leaking on the sixth floor of the jail is so bad that he has been unable to use it to house inmates. The jail population is near capacity with about 385 inmates, Grinnell said, and the 160 beds on the sixth floor would help alleviate future crowding.
At the same time the county is seeking to repair the jail complex, county officials are scrambling to upgrade the Hulse Detention Center. Officials must meet a state deadline to bring the overcrowded facility up to state standards or face possible court action.
A state inspector’s report this summer gave the Hulse center, at 3004 Grand Ave., Waukegan, until Jan. 1 to correct violations for having no toilets and no hot and cold running water in 16 of its 18 rooms.
The report also noted the county is sending about one-third of its juvenile inmates out of the area because Hulse cannot house them. At the time of the inspection in July, eight inmates were being held in out-of-county facilities.
Waller said Friday that authorities continue to send juveniles out of the county to ease the crowding while county officials are putting together their final proposal for expanding and rehabilitating the facility. Last spring, voters rejected an $8.8 million bond issue to fund a new juvenile facility. The new proposal, estimated to cost about $1 million, must be approved by the County Board.
But both County Board Chairman Robert Depke (R-Gurnee) and Robert Buhai (D-Highland Park), chairman of the County Board Finance Committee, have said they support the proposal to upgrade the facility.
