A $393 million plan for a new jail in Miami-Dade, and many questions on why and where

A plan to spend $393 million upgrading Miami-Dade’s aging, troubled jails with a modern facility that is far cheaper to run met with opposition Tuesday from residents who claimed unequal justice and commissioners who wanted it built far away.

The criticism highlighted the challenge ahead to improve a detention system already under federal supervision for substandard conditions and housing inmates in facilities opened when John F. Kennedy was president. A vote to accept the administration’s report simply explaining the plan failed on a 4 to 4 vote, with commissioners representing neighborhoods near the suggested construction site leading the opposition.

Mayor Carlos Gimenez proposed spending $393 million to abandon one jail in Miami and build a modern facility next to the existing Turner Guilford Knight Detention Center outside Virginia Gardens.

By shifting to modern equipment and jail designs, the Gimenez administration predicts that a new facility would require far fewer guards to run. That would let the county fund the project through savings from the Corrections Department’s current $380 million budget, spending mostly funded through property taxes.

The proposal drew a stream of critics at Tuesday’s commission meeting, and the speakers portrayed the plan as an effort to spend big on incarcerating people with low incomes instead of tackling social problems.

“I’m hearing you’d rather invest in the people of Miami-Dade’s imprisonment, rather than in their empowerment,” said Dorothy Jean-Claude, a canvasser for the New Florida Majority advocacy group in Miami. “We could use that money to help them with housing. But, no, we want to put them in jail.”

Melissa Tavares, an executive with the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said she sees jail construction as a way to boost space for federal immigration authorities to detain people being sought for deportation. She told commissioners to spend the money elsewhere. “We urge you to invest in building trust in our communities,” she said.

County administrators cast the budget complaints as misguided, since Miami-Dade wouldn’t spend new money for the jail construction under the plan. Instead, the county plans to take existing money spent on operations at aging jails and spend the savings from operating new ones to cover debt on the construction tab.

Without new facilities, Miami-Dade wouldn’t have the $49 million a year in payroll and operations savings to pay back the debt — or have money to spend on other needs.

Since 2013, Miami-Dade’s Corrections Department has been under a federal consent decree to upgrade conditions for inmates. Most of the violations have been satisfied, but the court order remains in place while Miami-Dade continues pursuing better health facilities for inmates, said Daniel Junior, corrections director.

“This is not about encouraging mass incarceration,” Junior told commissioners. “This is about humane conditions.”

With crime down across the country, Miami-Dade is seeing far fewer bookings than a decade ago. There are fewer inmates as well, from about 7,000 on an average day in 2008 to just over 4,300 in 2019, according to corrections statistics. Miami-Dade commissioners changed county law in 2015 to let officers write tickets for marijuana possession instead of arresting people and run diversion programs intended to keep people out of jail for minor offenses.

The county plan would close the 1961 pre-trial detention center off Northwest 13th Street in Miami, with beds for about 1,400 inmates.

It would build a new 1,400-bed facility by Guilford Knight, which would also be renovated. Part of the new facility would have courtrooms and offices for prosecutors and public defenders to allow for bail hearings, plea deals and other proceedings on-site and save transportation costs.

The proposed location was the main source of friction for commissioners. Miami-Dade had once planned on building a new jail in a more isolated area by Krome Avenue to the west. But the Gimenez administration sees that site as too isolated and too expensive, since building next to Guilford Knight reduces operational costs.

But the idea of adding 1,400 beds to a campus that already has room for 1,000 inmates is amplifying complaints that Guilford Knight is too much of a burden for surrounding neighborhoods.

Elected leaders in Virginia Gardens are fighting the plan, pointing to people wandering their neighborhoods after late-night releases from the jail with no way to get home.

“I’m asking for some consideration to be made for the transportation of these individuals back to their home communities, wherever they are,” said Virginia Gardens council member Elizabeth Taylor-Martinez.

Gimenez said the new jail plan includes funding for transporting released inmates so they won’t have to rely on county buses. County estimates put the maximum cost for that at $2 million a year, but the actual expense would likely be lower.

Pricey transportation services may be crucial to winning political support for the Guilford Knight site, which was met with stern opposition from commissioners representing the area.

“The problem is that location,” said Commissioner Jose “Pepe” Diaz, whose district includes the detention center. “I understand we need to do something. But this is not the way.”

Diaz voted against accepting the report, as did commissioners Eileen Higgins, Jean Monestime and Rebeca Sosa. That resulted in a tie for a vote that came near the end of a meeting that saw multiple commissioners leave early.

Chairwoman Audrey Edmonson told Junior to return later in the year with a revised proposal that includes multiple potential sites for a new jail. “This is a typical not-in-my-back-yard” situation, Edmonson said. “You’re going to catch that wherever you go.”