A county jail – even in a relatively new jail like the one Guilford County opened in downtown Greensboro a decade ago – is not a place you ever want to be.
And jail showers are notoriously places you especially don’t want to be.
That’s certainly true right now in the showers in the Guilford County Detention Center in downtown Greensboro, where conditions are concerning.
It’s a problem the county is about to spend nearly a half a million dollars to fix.
In this case, the jail’s shower floors and walls need repairs and county staff is requesting that the Guilford County Board of Commissioners approve $400,000 in project expenses to remedy the situation.
At the Thursday, May 18 meeting of the board, the commissioners will be asked to approve the proposed project to “repair shower floor and wall coatings in the Detention Center shower pods, including epoxy primer, mid coat, and urethane sealer.”
The county opened the detention center in downtown Greensboro just over a decade ago – after county taxpayers spent roughly $95 million on the giant new jail that replaced a crowded and dilapidated jail on the same block.
That old jail was meant to be torn down by now but is still standing because of a contract dispute between Guilford County and Samet Corp.
The (relatively) new jail in downtown Greensboro has faced other problems over the years despite its youth.
Last summer, for instance, the Guilford County Sheriff’s Department reported finding mold in inmate housing areas on the third, fifth and seventh levels.
In that case, Risk Management officials and the Sheriff’s Department hired an environmental testing company to perform air quality and mold assessments in the affected areas and hired another company to clean out any mold that was discovered.
If mold is still a problem in the jail these days, at least the inmates will have a nice place to clean themselves off once the county spends the $400,000 to fix the shower area.
Deliver a bucket of water and a bar of soap to each cell. Close the showers. Problem solved and it won’t cost 400k.
The real problem absence of maintenance. The prisoners can do all their maintenance at no labor expense to the taxpayer, as they are there, all day & night.
Name something our local govt does right.
Why not put the imate(s) to work? Teach them a skill and pay a fair wage. Yes the are incarcerated could they be taught a skill that could help when they get out of jail. Might as well put our tax dollars and inmates to work instead of just our tax dollars.
I bet there are some who have this skill.
Just a suggestion instead of having them laying around.
They used to do that at the County Prison Farm. They closed it because it worked and made sense but didn’t turn a profit. It might not have been a revenue generating machine, but it changed lives and kept idle hands busy.
I’m sure there are some that have plumbing experience that are incarcerated!! Save the tax dollars and let the inmates do it!! Instead of spending our tax dollars let the inmates do it!!it could be beneficial for when they are released!
The inmates did not build the building. Taxpayers paid a company to build the jail to code 10 years ago. Is it too late to hold the company accountable for the shoddy work? If the work was not shoddy, and the mold is a result of lack of maintenance, why did our leadership not include maintenance in the budget?