Jail layout under preliminary consideration due to holding cell shortage

ANTIGO — Wednesday morning, the county board’s public property committee approved potential spending on an architectural study of the county jail that would be conducted to determine the feasibility of constructing additional temporary holding cells in the building.

The measure must be passed by the entire county board at a future meeting before any funds are actually made available for the potential study, according to Langlade County Administrator Jason Hilger.

“We’re dealing with more and more people who come to us with more and more problems, whether it’s alcohol or drugs, and then we don’t have space to hold them in while they cool off or the investigation is done, or until they get possibly booked out in the morning,” Hilger said. “The other issue is that we have limited availability or space for education and rehabilitation for our current inmates.”

Langlade County Sheriff Mark Westen said the jail, which was built in 2000, is a 119-bed facility, but only has three holding cells.

“Those holding cells are a very, very important tool for what happens in any operation of jail functions,” Westen said. “Taking in new inmates, unfortunately sometimes for disciplinary reasons, they need to be segregated, etc. So we have three receiving cells that are available to our staff now. What I wanted to do was explore some options that might be a renovation project someday in the future that would help alleviate the problems we have had with having only three receiving cells.”

Westen mentioned segregation cells as an element of a potential reconfigured layout, though he emphasized that any changes would depend on the results of the architectural assessment.

“I would like to explore a lot of different options,” he said. “Our three existing receiving cells could be utilized in a different capacity as more disciplinary, segregation type cells, and intake receiving cells could be perhaps constructed or reconfigured at a different portion of the jail.”

Since the jail’s construction over two decades ago, Westen said “the functionality of what we call ‘the classroom’ has changed immensely.”

“It is now more of a video courtroom than it is for providing programming or stuff like that. We need to cater to judges. We need to make sure that we are able to do Zoom hearings in there, and that has really consumed a lot of time and space in what we used to call ‘the classroom’ that was used for programming,” Westen said. “So now, as we’re trying to continue and add even more and more programming — and that is one thing that the state always urges us to do is make sure that we’re doing everything that we can to provide the proper resources to inmates that are in our custody to get them ready for release and make them better people when they get out — that area of opportunity has been narrowed and narrowed, because the amount of time that we have to utilize that classroom has been severely reduced.”

Hilger said part of the funding for the potential project could source from the roughly $800,000 the county is eventually slated to receive as part of the massive opioid lawsuit that was settled by several pharmaceutical companies.

“We can pay for things that we can tie together as a result of opioid use,” Hilger said. “So likely, if we’re going to build five new holding cells, we couldn’t pay for all five with opioid money, because they’d be used for other reasons, and the same with, say, a classroom setting. If we said, ‘Hey, 25 percent of the time we’re going to use it to help combat opioids, opioid education, opioid rehabilitation or whatever,’ then logically, we could pay for 25 percent of that room with opioid money.”

Hilger insinuated that the project would likely need to be considered by the county board at some point.

“It might take you all year to figure out what you want to do, or it could be used in 2026, 2027, 2028,” he said. “I just think it’s something with the number of jail cells we have that there’s a need for it, both the classroom education aspect, and the holding/receiving cell issue. We can always keep kicking it down the road, but that’s not progress.”