As the sheriff of Webster County, Luke Fleener is required by Iowa law to run a county jail. Over the last two years, as the county has looked into whether there’s a need for a new facility to replace the existing 41-year-old jail, Fleener has noted many safety concerns he has in the aging and overcrowded jail.

“My biggest fear … is that one of our officers is assaulted, injured or killed in that environment,” Fleener said during an Oct. 18 informational meeting about the bond referendum that would fund the new jail.

The existing jail in the Law Enforcement Center at 702 First Ave. S. is designed on a “linear” floor plan, meaning the cell blocks run along tight hallways. The design also means the jail is wholly camera-dependent when it comes to monitoring the inmates. The control room is a windowless room with two large TV screens and a couple computer monitors with up to 25 different live camera feeds to monitor the facility.

There are no direct lines of sight into any cells or inmate spaces, requiring the correctional officers to come in very close contact with potentially violent offenders on a daily basis as they deliver food trays, collect laundry and try to clean.

“The issue with that is we have 10 people in our custody who have been charged with murder or attempted murder and our officers are face-to-face with those offenders,” Fleener said.

The design of the proposed new facility incorporates safety features so correctional officers don’t have to have that face-to-face interaction with violent offenders, he said.

The proposed design for a new jail has a “podular” set-up, with a central control room surrounded by two levels of cells in a horseshoe formation, allowing the staff in the control room to have a direct line of sight into each cell. The design would have 61 general population cells double-bunked and eight special needs cells with one bunk, totaling 130 beds.

The safety concerns begin as soon as a police officer or sheriff’s deputy brings an arrested individual to the Law Enforcement Center to be booked into jail, Fleener said.

The arresting officer parks their vehicle in the sallyport, a garage-like section of the building, and walks the individual to the booking room. That room, Fleener said, is too small, cannot handle more than one arrested individual at a time and has furniture with sharp edges and expensive equipment that are easily accessible to someone wanting to act unruly. Because there’s only space for one arrested individual at a time, if other individuals have been arrested around the same time, those officers have to wait with them in their patrol vehicles until they can be processed through the booking room. This also ties up the officer, who has to remain with the individual until they are booked into the jail.

“Once this process is completed, they go down the hallway and in an elevator to go up three floors,” Fleener said.

The only way to access the jail floor is via the elevator, and it carries the risk that an unruly inmate could assault an officer and cause serious injuries in such a small, confined space.

At the Oct. 18 meeting, Fleener highlighted the jail tours being offered to the public leading up to the bond referendum vote.

“You can see on your own some of the dangers that our officers have,” he said.

The final jail tours will be from 2 to 4 p.m. Nov. 4.

Another safety concern Fleener has with the existing jail is what to do if the building is damaged by a tornado or fire or otherwise needs to be evacuated. First, the corrections officers would have to move inmates in groups down the elevator because, again, the jail floor is only accessible by the elevator. Then, according to the emergency action plan, the inmates and staff are to board buses to be transported to the Fort Dodge Correctional Facility to be placed in a secure location until the emergency is over.

The problem with that plan, Fleener said, is that the sallyport is too small to drive a standard-sized bus through, so staff would have to take inmates outside in order to load them on buses, potentially giving the inmates an opportunity to attempt to escape.

Iowa law guarantees jail inmates the right to have recreational opportunities. On the roof of the LEC is the jail’s main rec area, which requires a correctional officer to take groups of up to eight inmates at a time up the elevator to the rec area, Fleener said. The one correctional officer supervises the inmates alone, while another officer in the control room monitors the cameras from the space.

The study into whether the existing jail is meeting the needs of Webster County was triggered by Fleener noticing that his office budgets hundreds of thousands of dollars each year to house Webster County inmates in other county jails because the existing jail doesn’t have the capacity to hold everyone in custody.

This means that those “overflow” inmates need to be transported to those other counties. Often, that also means those inmates have to be driven back and forth in order to be taken to medical appointments and court hearings.

Each time an inmate has to be transported outside the walls of the jail, there’s risk, Fleener said.

“The increased risk for us as a county is the lone deputy or jailer in a vehicle traveling up and down the highway with one or two or three inmates in a car,” he told The Messenger in May. “We try to do everything we possibly can to make that as safe as possible. But let’s face it, the car could break down or get into an accident, they could get ambushed by somebody that wants to break them out. All those things are real possibilities that could happen and that is a huge liability for us.”

Twice this summer, an inmate from Webster County briefly escaped from the Humboldt County Jail before being apprehended and returned to custody.

“That is the inherent risk of moving people outside of our facility to take them places,” Fleener said.

New jail facilities incorporate all those moving parts within the walls of that structure, he said. Medical providers are able to provide services to inmates at the jail rather than at the clinic, and many court proceedings are done virtually via video conferencing when the jail facility is equipped with the right tools.

Have any questions you want answered about the proposed jail project or the Nov. 7 bond referendum? Email kwingert@messengernews.net.