Latest Cuyahoga County Jail Design Features Natural Aesthetics and ‘Earthy’ Designs to Make a More Livable Environment

Oceanscape murals and “abstract visuals” of water. “Residential warmth,” wood acoustic paneling and “resilient woven floor tiles.” “Earthy & nature inspired hues.”

These aren’t design details for some suburban dentist office or boutique hotel. These are plans for how Cuyahoga County is going to design the bulk of its new jail, to be built in Garfield Heights by the end of the decade.

In the first update on the project since February, Jeff Appelbaum, managing director with Project Management Consultants, toured Cuyahoga County Council’s Public Safety & Justice Services Committee on a schematic design and budget sheet that could be finalized by the end of the year.

All told, Appelbaum told committee head Michael Gallagher, the final price tag will be about $890,266,460 when all said and done. With about a $132 million cost to county taxpayers.

In that price tag, one scrutinized at Tuesday’s meeting, lies a more detailed design plan of how, in the next few years, the new county jail will look, both to its thousands of inmates and to the correctional staff.

Along with bigger cells, more beds and an overall thematic focus on the correction part of correctional, the new county jail is, Appelbaum told Council, also going to be designed completely different than the rigid, austere one that has sat downtown for the past five decades.

The theme being such: less gray bars; more calm and more nature.

“There’s a lot of cold elements in a jail: hardened steel, concrete,” Appelbaum said. “The idea is to come up with design concepts which make the environment less harsh, which soften the environment, which make it more livable and inviting.”

“Both for those who are inmates there and for the people who have to work there every day to have a calming influence in the environment,” he added, “which is all very important.”

In the past few years, Appelbaum, along with those in county design and engineering, have toured newly-built jails in other cities and counties—from Nashville to Davidson County, Kentucky.

What Cuyahoga County executives and staff assigned to the site in Garfield Heights have been tasked with is how to merge “best practices” in today’s jail designs with dire needs leftover by a current jail long-beset with its own problems, from overcrowding to below subpar food.

Those needs may actually be how the jail looks, not just how it functions.

Research into jail and prison aesthetics have influenced prison design in the Netherlands and California, which all stem from a contemporary correctional philosophy: what jail cells, common areas and multi-purpose rooms look like actually impact a prisoner’s sense of rehabilitation.

“Light and color affect our mental health. Being deprived of these natural ingredients for our well-being leads to someone’s diminishment, leading to stress, anger, and possibly violence,” a writer for the site Aesthetics Research says in an article. “What do we expect after removing core elements of people’s humanity, that they would remain dignified?”

Appelbaum seemed to echo this in Tuesday’s update, where he tried to convince Council that the design process, set to wrap up in October, is both aligned with this aesthetic philosophy and with requirements set by Ohio law. (Like, say, how big cell sizes have to be.)

But it’s safe to say creative liberty was taken. Each of the jail’s three levels—ordered mostly based on age, severity of crime and step in the justice system—are assigned a kind of natural theme: floor one, “Water”; floor two, “Forest”; floor three, “Meadow.”

Appelbaum said the themes would be a “calming influence in the jail.”

“Look, I don’t think it’s fair to say there’s any one jail where people said, we want that. But there were aspects, best practices in all these jails,” Appelbaum said. “And I will also tell you, every one of these jail projects, if you go and you talk to the administrators or the sheriffs, in retrospect, they said, we love our project.”

Gallagher, who sympathized more with the correctional officers in the room who work at the 49-year-old Justice Center, still pushed back on Appelbaum’s references to best practices when building a jail—from how units are laid out to what paint hues go where.

“I can’t think of any one thing you could go look at,” Appelbaum said. “Because there’s no agreement, you know, as to what the ultimate best practice is.”

“So, ‘best practices’ really doesn’t mean ‘best practices,’” Gallagher said.

“Well, it’s a collection of wisdom by all these experts,” Appelbaum said.

“Where is that library of wisdom that I can go to?”

Appelbaum paused. “Let me get back to you,” he said, “and let me figure out a better answer than what I have.”

Construction on the county jail, following the final design process, is set to kick off later this year and last until at least February 2029.

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This article appears in May 22 – Jun 4, 2025.