URBANA — Champaign County Board members are about to begin investigating closing the county's downtown Urbana jail and expanding the newer satellite jail on the east side of Urbana.

Consultants from the Department of Justice's National Institute of Corrections, who assessed county jail facilities last month, even suggested closing the downtown jail as early as this year, calling conditions there "deplorable" and "depressing."

The consultants recommended "that the county board join the sheriff in making a decision to close the downtown jail (as soon as possible) and move the females and others to the satellite jail," wrote Warren Cook and Mark Martin of the National Institute of Corrections. "This can be done this year, through the use of minimum or medium jail beds, through the use of dormitory-style housing units for traffic and minor offenders. This will result in freeing up more jail beds for females and special needs inmates, currently held within the downtown jail."

But county officials said that's not likely to happen.

"They're from different areas of the country," said Sheriff Dan Walsh. "One of their solutions was to have contractors voluntarily give us prefab housing units so that they could take tax deductions and then we'd just stick them out there (at the satellite jail) and put people in them. I don't think contractors are going to be willing to do that. And even if they are, it's not as simple as just dropping a building. You still have to hook up the utilities, basically build it on, and you still have to have officers in those units.

"So I don't think there's anything we're going to be able to do this year."

But Walsh said the downtown jail, which opened in 1980, was poorly designed, is already antiquated and cannot meet the needs of today's jail population.

The county board is scheduled to begin discussing what to do with the jail at a committee of the whole meeting at 6 p.m. today (Tuesday) at the Brookens Administrative Center, 1776 E. Washington St., U.

"Our inmates are sicker and sicker, both physically and mentally," Walsh said. "I could probably use a couple full-time doctors and nurses and an ICU unit. There are times when we run out of space for all of the people who have special, unique medical and mental health needs."

Further, he said, he has a large enough female inmate population (15 percent, when a jail population "snapshot" was taken April 25) that there isn't an adequate space for them.

"If I take a pod out of the satellite jail to put in 20, 25 or 30 women, then I don't know what to do with the 60 men I've just displaced," he said. "Then I have 30 empty beds I can't use. That's the issue."

There a numerous operational problems within the jail, Walsh said.

"It's dark. It's dismal. There aren't clear lines of sight and it's extremely difficult for officers to watch very much of the jail at any given time," the sheriff said. "Just the window design, you could have 100 percent of your attention devoted to one cell block and you still don't see all of that cell block," he said. "And when you're looking at that, you don't see the other two or three (cell blocks) because of the way it's designed."

In a separate report, the county's facilities director, Alan Reinhart, said that the old jail will require $1.5 million to $1.8 million in capital improvements over the next three to four years, including a new roofing system, restoration of its brick and mortar exterior, a replacement boiler system, a new climate control system and an emergency generation system.

Building an addition to the satellite jail will take years of planning and construction, Walsh admitted.

"Even if the county board said today, 'Dan, build me a jail as quickly as you can. Here's an unlimited checkbook,' it is going to take years because there is a lot of planning and thought required," he said. "Building or adding onto a jail is something most sheriffs do once. So it's not like anybody has had a lot of practice. So we want to go to the experts. Since we only have one shot at it, we want to do the best that we possibly can."

State's Attorney Julia Rietz said she believes the downtown jail should have been closed "years ago."

"I've said that for years. Every time I speak to a community group, I tell them that the county board needs to have a plan to close that facility and move everything out to what we call the satellite jail," she said.

She said the National Institute of Corrections consultants were "very concerned about someone suing the county, particularly with regard to the disparate treatment between female inmates and male inmates. That is a big concern that they addressed with us."

In their report, the consultants cited five specific "negative conditions" in the downtown jail, including its "deplorable conditions;" its "debilitated" operational systems; its "limited artificial and natural light and dingy colors" that make conditions "depressing for staff and inmates;" the disparate gender treatment of men and women, with females and special-needs inmates held in the older jail while men are held in the newer facility; and the lack of any programs for female inmates.

"The providers note that inmates who are kept in these conditions regress mentally and after a fashion assume a state of physical and mental malady that have significant negative impact on their lives for years to come," they wrote.

They suggested that females and special-needs inmates at the downtown jail have access to educational and counseling resources such as Alcoholics Anonymous and GED programs.