Officials eager about new jail: $5.8 million site expected to be ready in January

Mathis Winkler

Thursday, Oct. 18, 2001 | 8:54 a.m.

The sight of concrete and steel at North Las Vegas Detention Center's newest building pleases Capt. Dan Lake.

That's because the $5.8 million addition, due to open in January, will include increased security, which will make it easier to supervise inmates.

"This building is something we've truly needed," Lake said during a tour of the construction site at the jail's north end Monday.

For the past nine years Lake and his colleagues made do with the city's makeshift jail, hastily built after a federal consent decree mandated immediate improvements to the city's facility.

"The majority of the jail is (composed of) trailer houses," Lake said. The new building, "that's a jail. Trailer houses are not."

The federal government is funding the new jail. In return, city officials guaranteed the U.S. Marshals Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service 450 beds, which will be used for their detainees. Both agencies, which don't have their own jails in the valley, will pay the city $62 per inmate each day.

Though most of the detention center's 640 inmates stay in 50-bed dormitories, the 400 inmates in the new building will be housed in 100 cells. With the new building, the number of beds will increase to 750.

A higher level of security in the new building doesn't mean that it will house the most dangerous inmates, said Lake, who has overseen the project for the past two years. Instead, the men who will move there will actually have to prove themselves as model inmates.

"We want to work more closely with people instead of just warehousing them," Lake said, adding that small things such as painting the shower rooms "off-white with a splash of blush" may help create a more friendly atmosphere.

"With the new facility, we're trying to do the right thing," Lake said. "And the right thing is to provide a format for improvement."

Improvement means education, and Lake said jail officials will offer general equivalency diploma classes, computer training and "life skills" courses to inmates.

"Some won't even apply for jobs, because they don't know how to fill out an application," Lake said, adding that more than 50 people have already signed up as volunteers to teach at the jail.

"We want the inmates to want to make a difference," he said. "While they're here (in jail,) let's see how they can benefit from it."

Shelley Johnson Listwan, a professor in the criminal justice department at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said educational programs in jails can be effective in helping inmates get back on their feet, though most inmates are only in jail for a short time.

Because many inmates in North Las Vegas are jailed repeatedly, Lake said that he and his colleagues will have more than one chance to help prisoners break that cycle.

"Maybe we don't get them the first time" they're in jail, he said. "But maybe the second time."