ADELANTO >> Three years in the making, the $145.4 million expansion of the High Desert Detention Center adds 1,392 new beds to help relieve jail overcrowding brought about by the realignment of state prisoners.
On Thursday, hundreds rank and file from the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department and officials from across the county gathered at the High Desert Detention Center to celebrate the opening of the expanded jail. The project increases the jail’s footprint by 297,000 square feet to over 8 acres, and includes new medical and dental facilities that eliminate the need for deputies to transport inmates to West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga for those services.
“We’ve constructed a facility that is truly state of the art,” Sheriff John McMahon said during Thursday’s event, where a tour of the jail’s expanded wing followed. “This is a great opportunity for us to keep moving forward in the corrections business.”
A special coating on the walls in the jail’s intake and medical areas reduces the spread of infectious diseases such as staph infections, which are common in jails, prisons, and other communal living facilities.
Not having to drive prisoners to Rancho Cucamonga from the High Desert allows deputies to get back to their patrol duties faster after booking them in Adelanto.
The jail’s expanded wing will open in three phases, as the Sheriff’s Department’s budget allows for staffing of the facility. The first phase will see 222 beds filled within the next couple weeks, and the inmates who get those beds will be those whose cases are being heard in High Desert courtrooms.
Construction on the project began in 2011 and included a new 25,00-square-foot booking building, three housing units, remodeled kitchen and laundry facilities, a new parking lot and fire access roads. A number of unforeseen issues during construction including design flaws and changes to building codes caused the project budget to increase by $25.4 million.
The facility is equipped with a high definition video-surveillance system, and video monitors in each housing unit will allow inmates to visit with family and others. They will no longer be allowed face-to-face visitations because inmate movement is being restricted for security purposes, said the jail’s commander Capt. Jon Marhoefer.
Video visitation has been in place for the past year at smaller jails in Barstow and Joshua Tree and is becoming a trend statewide, Marhoefer said.
“You will see more and more of this,” Marhoefer said, adding that the video visiting system at the High Desert Detention Center is the first time the county has implemented the technology on such a large scale.
As the county’s jails swelled in the 1990s and began reaching full capacity, the need for more became apparent. In 2008, the county applied for, and received, $100 million from the state for the expansion project, initially budgeted at $144 million.
The state funding was made available through the Offender Rehabilitation Services Act of 2007, which freed up $1.2 billion for jail construction projects across California.
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