County Jail Architects Make Case for Low-Rise, Four-Story Campus Design in Garfield Heights

A rendering of the proposed new jail in Garfield Heights. Credit: HOK Architects

Architects and consultants hired by Cuyahoga County argued to council members Tuesday that a four-story building on a 40-acre site in a Garfield Heights industrial park would be the most efficient case for the area’s new, $1 billion-plus jail.

That design case, led by the county’s longtime consultant for all things jail, Jeff Applebaum, has filled in more details as to what Cuyahoga’s replacement for its aging, jammed-packed Justice Center will look like when—or if—it’s built in the decade to come.

And built, as parties argued at Council’s Public Safety & Justice Affairs Committee meeting on Tuesday, to both satisfy safety concerns and operational worries. It would need 1,900-plus beds, and allow room for more. It would need to permit a range of rehabilitation features—a behavioral care facility, a Release & Re-entry Resource Center—while attempting to stay within budget.

Which all comes down to Applebaum’s main argument with jail design: size matters.

“Too high is not good,” he told Council. “Getting it lower and lower and lower, and clearly under 75 feet, is completely desirable.”

“Too low is not good,” he added. “So, there’s a sweet spot.”

That sweet spot, sold by Applebaum and HOK Architect’s Jeff Goodale on Tuesday, is an L-shaped, campus-style facility, with four levels of stacked buildings like Legos stuck together, with some three levels of housing for inmates flanked by the Sheriff’s offices, a K9 yard, office space for mental health workers and parking lots.

Goodale, who’s also helping design a new jail in San Mateo County, Texas, and in Brooklyn, New York, framed jail design as a factor in both how inmates serve time and how efficiently staff can shuffle medicine to cells or guards can respond to scuffles. It’s why, he suggested, rebuilding a high-rise Justice Center in Downtown Cleveland would not be the ideal approach to spending county dollars.

Jeff Goodale, the HOK architect leading the county jail’s redesign, defended the plans for a four-story building on the county’s chosen site in Garfield Heights. Credit: Mark Oprea

Jail workers “have only a certain amount of time to get anywhere within the facility under emergency conditions,” Goodale told Council.

Jail admins, Sheriff’s Department officers, and behavioral health nurses should, Goodale added, all have unfettered access to one another. “So they could share resources, training and so forth,” he said. “It would be an efficiency not only in terms of what we build, but also an efficiency in terms of operations.”

Neither Goodale nor Applebaum threw out any definite numbers as far as what this latest, four-story design would cost the county. Estimates since 2022, as pitched to Councilman Michael Gallagher or tossed out by County Executive Chris Ronayne, have spanned $750 million to $2 billion.

Jail design is very much a concern of form and function. Correctional facilities in Denmark and Sweden tend to stress “rehabilitation,” with jails flush with natural light, libraries and areas for meditation. Ronayne himself has long stressed that the county’s replacement for the Justice Center inch closer to the rehab side of the correctional spectrum.

But issues come with the Garfield location. Building near Transportation Boulevard means conflicting with residential areas just down the street. And being ten miles east of Downtown means a mass relocation of bail bonds businesses, pro-bono legal services and public transit for the arraigned and their families without vehicles. (RTA’s plans for a bus stop have “not been finalized,” Goodale said.)

Councilman Gallagher, who expressed disdain years ago for anything Justice Center-related that wasn’t a renovation of the Downtown facility, seemed to fret that too much time (and money) was being spent fidgeting with jail design. As he iterated in a 2022 council meeting about the jail: time is money.

“We have to come to conclusions with the administration as to where we’re at, where we’re going,” he said, “so we can unleash the design team to do what they do and to finally get into 2025 to get that bottom line, dollar amount fixed.”

He added: “So we’re going to move as quickly and as judiciously as we can.”