Baltimore’s new $1 billion jail will be most expensive state-funded project in history
Ben Conarck and Pamela Wood
The Baltimore Banner
March 14, 2024
Nearly nine years after former Gov. Larry Hogan shuttered the old Baltimore City Detention Center, a new centerpiece facility for the city’s pretrial jail population is poised to rise from its ashes. But it’s going to cost you.
The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which has run the city’s jail system for decades, is pushing ahead with ambitious plans for the Baltimore Therapeutic Treatment Center — a sort of hybrid jail, hospital and mental health and substance use treatment facility for people facing criminal charges.
The cost of the $1 billion project is being spread across more than five years, with an estimated completion date in 2029. Once finished, the operating costs are expected to be more than $100 million per year.
The facility’s price tag is $443 million more than initial estimates by the corrections department. It’s being attributed to supply chain problems and inflation. A nonpartisan legislative analysis dubbed the plan “the most expensive state-run project in Maryland history.”
The state says it needs the new facility to comply with the 2016 settlement of a decades-old lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of health care in Baltimore jails. The lawsuit is ongoing, and the corrections department has yet to come into full compliance with any of the nine provisions of that agreement.
And yet, the civil rights groups suing the city over those conditions questioned whether a new building was going to address the challenges that have led the state to be off track with the terms of the settlement.
The state’s shortcomings in medical and mental health care, they contend, have less to do with physical limitations of the buildings and more to do with the complexities of running a health care system. Meanwhile, the number of beds proposed for the jail has been scaled down due to cost: 1,462 beds to 854.
The downsizing comes as Baltimore’s jail system is already bursting at the seams. Its facilities have been nearly at the system’s 959-bed capacity over the last several months, according to census numbers provided by civil rights groups. The population has hovered between 800 and 900 people. A recent estimate was 884 people, or 92% full.
David Fathi, director of the ACLU’s National Prison Project and a plaintiff in the health care lawsuit, called the Baltimore jail system a “train wreck of dysfunction.”
“Building a new building is not going to fix all of the problems, by any means,” he said.
Fathi’s team has toured the facilities and noted the dire conditions of the buildings. The Baltimore Central Booking and Intake Center and the accompanying detention complexes that currently make up the jail system, he said, also lack dedicated work spaces for certain nursing units, and there isn’t adequate space for mental health treatment, among other issues.
In 2022, Fathi’s National Prison Project revealed in a report that the jail was so overcrowded that men were sleeping on plastic “boats” in the gymnasium.
There is also the looming question of who will work in the facility. The state corrections department is facing a severe staffing shortage of correctional officers, and its current private medical provider has been tied to a controversial bankruptcy case that could threaten the viability of the company.
While Fathi didn’t argue that the facilities needed improvements, he pointed out that the corrections department’s stance in Annapolis — that it needed the new jail to comply with the terms of the health care lawsuit settlement — contradicted its posture in dozens of Baltimore courtroom hearings.