Rethinking the Allegheny County Jail Facility
Allegheny County, in partnership with a team of contracted correctional planning experts, is undertaking a process to examine how the Allegheny County Jail building might be redesigned or repurposed to promote today’s goal of a smaller population that optimizes employee and incarcerated individuals’ safety, health, and well-being, and better prepares incarcerated individuals for successful re-entry to the community by adding non-carceral space that supports a range of services.
Since beginning their work in fall 2022, the team has taken several steps to accomplish these goals, including:
- Facilitating discussion sessions (four in total) with individuals who were formerly incarcerated, friends and family members of individuals who are or were incarcerated, individuals and families impacted by crime, and advocacy and service provider groups
- Facilitating discussion sessions (three in total) with individuals who currently incarcerated in the facility
- Conducting four separate site visits to the facility:
- An initial, two-day tour of the facility and alternative housing sites
- A four-day in-depth tour of the facility, including conversations with jail leadership and staff
- A two-day site visit to the facility focused on the electrical, plumbing, fire, and HVAC systems, as well as the general architecture of the facility
- A one-day tour of the facility focused on housing units
- Speaking with other stakeholders within the criminal legal system
Additionally, the consultant team surveyed Allegheny County residents on their perceptions of the physical facility, including which spaces within and potential changes to the facility, they would prioritize. In all, 372 full or partial responses were received.
This deck provides a summary of the survey results(PDF, 2MB) as compiled by DLR Group, one of the consultants working on the redesign process. Key findings include:
- Identification of the intake area, medical spaces, and housing units/pods as highest priority areas for physical improvements
- Identification of more support services, cleanliness, and fresh air as highest priority interventions to the physical facility that would improve the well-being of incarcerated individuals
History
In October 2018, Allegheny County received a grant to participate in the MacArthur Foundation Safety + Justice Challenge. The national initiative is aimed and reimagining and rebuilding local criminal justice systems to reduce jail incarceration and increase equity. In February 2021, Allegheny County was one of 15 jurisdictions selected for additional funding based on the promise and progress of work to date. That 2021 proposal included several strategies and initiatives including completing a community-informed redesign of the physical structure of the jail to reflect a significantly smaller population and optimize the space for co-location of human services, including diversion programming and other prevention services.
CDI Architects Group, which was acquired by TranSystems in 2021, is contracted to lead the team of correctional experts including DLR Group, an architecture and planning firm with deep experience working on cutting-edge jail and criminal legal system facilities. The team is being supported by Pittsburgh-based MonWin Consulting that will work to infuse the voices of individuals directly impacted by the jail into this process, and by Falcon Correctional, which focuses on improving behavioral healthcare within correctional facilities.
Additional Resources
Other Criminal Justice Reform Initiatives
This effort is part of a larger commitment Allegheny County has made to preventing criminal justice involvement and safely reducing reliance on incarceration; in addition to the two decades of work by the Allegheny County Criminal Justice Advisory Board, these other efforts have been impactful in our community:
In 2015, County Executive Rich Fitzgerald asked the University of Pittsburgh’s Institute of Politics to assemble a Task Force to examine how the criminal justice system could become "fairer and less costly, without compromising public safety."
In 2018, Allegheny County was awarded a Safety + Justice Challenge (SJC) grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation that supports strategies to reduce the Allegheny County Jail population. The county’s Safety + Justice Challenge efforts have since received additional funding to support its efforts based on its progress and promise to date. The SJC strategies are anticipated to continue reducing the jail population, including making court processing more efficient, closely monitoring the population that is detained for probation violations, and utilizing alternatives to arrest and incarceration wherever possible.
In 2020, DHS and Allegheny County Emergency Services co-convened a Crisis Response Stakeholder Group to improve Allegheny County’s response to behavioral health crises. In February 2021, the group issued 16 recommendations focused on improving behavioral health crisis prevention and response, which the county has been working to implement. In August 2022, Allegheny County was selected to participate in a Harvard University initiative implementing alternative to nonviolent 9-1-1 calls.(PDF, 145KB)
For more than a decade, Allegheny County and its partners, including the court system, have collaborated on strategies to reduce recidivism. A 2014 evaluation of the county’s reentry program(PDF, 268KB) found that it reduced the probability of re-arrest for medium and high-risk individuals by 24%.