Allegheny County Jail. (Photo by Ryan Loew/PublicSource)
Quietly executed, the contract with CDI Architects calls for a lengthy process including community engagement.
by Charlie Wolfson, PublicSource
Allegheny County has hired a consulting firm to plan an overhaul of its jail, offering a glimpse of the future as the jail’s leadership finds itself under scrutiny and County Executive Rich Fitzgerald’s administration nears the last of its 12 years in office.
The $700,000 contract was signed July 14 with CDI Architects, a subsidiary of TranSystems. It outlines plans for months of community engagement and an examination of how to redesign the Allegheny County Jail [ACJ] while reducing the number of people who pass through it and improving care for people in the justice system who have physical or mental health concerns. An explicit goal of the project is to reduce the jail’s population by half or more.
In an emailed statement, Fitzgerald said his administration has “worked collaboratively and collectively to think about criminal justice in new and different ways. The [request for proposals leading to the contract] that was issued to look at how the space in the county jail can be used differently is the latest step in those efforts.”
Fitzgerald’s spokesperson, Amie Downs, said an initial meeting with CDI is being scheduled and it’s too soon to say when work will begin or end.
In June 2021, the county released a request for proposals [RFP], seeking a consultant to help it redesign the jail to hold drastically fewer people. The county made no public announcement about the initiative and negotiations with CDI were not publicly disclosed until a PublicSource inquiry last month.
The RFP stated that the county was “committed to reducing reliance on incarceration” and sought a consultant to redesign the towering Uptown jail to accommodate a smaller population. The jail’s population is markedly lower than it has been during much of its 28-year history. Its population was frequently above 2,500 between 2017 and early 2020, but it has averaged 1,666 in 2022. The average population dropped sharply at the onset of the pandemic when there was a slowdown in arrests and many people were released to reduce crowding, and it has not risen since then.
The county sought proposals to reduce the jail’s capacity to between 500 and 1,100, and the plan delivered by CDI acknowledges that such a facility would not be sufficient for the number of people the county incarcerates at ACJ today.
“The success of this project rests in large part on the ongoing collaboration and active cooperation of the major players,” the plan reads, including police and the judicial branch. While the county executive manages the jail, it is the county’s many police departments that arrest people who end up there, and it is the judiciary that decides who is jailed and for how long.
Downs said the courts and the district attorney “have been involved in this process throughout,” referring to broad projects around criminal justice reform, and added that CDI would be reaching out to them.
A spokesperson for District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said they had not been contacted by the county administration about the jail redesign project. A representative for President Judge Kim Berkeley Clark did not respond to requests for comment.
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