Lancaster County Approves $90 Million Investment in New Detention Center

LANCASTER COUNTY, S.C. — Out with the old and in with the new. 

Lancaster County officials are on track to build a new 62-acre county detention center to replace the current 45-year-old facility.

Lancaster County Administrator Dennis Marstall says the county was cited for some deficiencies regarding overcrowding, the lack of modernization in their infrastructure, and the lack of security features with cameras. 

County officials say modern detention centers have a classification structure when dealing with inmates’ gender, age, and different offenses; the current facility doesn’t meet those accommodations.

“We’re almost going to triple our current facility. We’re going basically from a 129-bed facility to about a 329-person facility. Of course, we have growth in the county, but we again want to make sure we’re addressing future needs. Once you make this a big investment, you want to last for a while,” Marstall said. 

An updated building will also have more safety technology.

“Certainly video camera and remoteless entry so we can control different locks opening from a distance or cameras. So it gives us the safety features that we need, both for inmates and for our staff,” he said. “We’re trying to be smart about how we do some of the core features, meaning where we have the kitchen set up, even things required these days for jails, detention centers, medical facilities, evaluation intake facilities, how you do the inmate transfers, so all these features that you have to have in today’s modern facilities to make sure safety is paramount for everyone involved,” Marstall said. 

The $90 million facility is part of 14 projects stemming from a 2020 capital project sales tax initiative. Marstall says voters passed the referendum and allowed the county to allocate $30 million and allowed the county to bond for the rest of it.

Marstall says the county will use the excess proceeds in the sales tax to help complete the project funding. 

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For years, the county has balanced inmate numbers daily. 

“We are over our current capacity. We’ve had to put some people in what used to be waiting rooms, used to be visit rooms and phone rooms. And so we’ve had to create different spaces, one, to accommodate just the sheer population, but also to accommodate the different populations based on gender and other things. We’ve just really been winging it, so to speak, in terms of using every available space that we have, but also in the safest manner possible to make sure staff safety and inmate safety,” Marstall explained. 

The new jail will have arraignment offices and office space for judges. The center will only hold pretrial detainees and occasional federal inmates.

“We’re also going to put out there a new evidence storage facility for the sheriff’s department. So we’re really creating a criminal justice, law enforcement, public safety kind of scenario or center for a lot of different services,” Marstall said. 

Lancaster mayor and attorney T. Alston DeVenny says he’s noticed the overcrowding and aging of the building over the years.

“Our community is very sensitive to having safe jails about 46, 47 years ago, we had a terrible jail fire here in Lancaster and several inmates died as a result. So the county council has always been proactive in trying to move forward, having a safe place,” said Mayor DeVenny. “I feel very good about this facility is going to particularly help be able to address folks with mental illness that have been arrested, folks that are not violent and serving contempt of court issues.”

Marstall says it will be another 2-3 years before the facility is operating.