New Kane County Jail's opening should be on time

Construction of the new Kane County jail and sheriff's office is proceeding on time and should be ready to house inmates by September, Sheriff Pat Perez said Wednesday.

All of the major components and building construction will be done by the end of May, jail Cmdr. Patrick Keaty said.

The last system to be installed is the security system.

Then the staff will spend the summer shaking down the building -- testing equipment and training the staff, he said.

Staff and inmates will move from Fabyan Parkway to the new site on Route 38 near the Kane County Judicial Center in two waves.

Sheriff's deputies and civilian support staff will go first, by mid-July. "If we can get in there sooner we will," Perez said. That includes the civil division officers presently working out of an office near the old Kane County Courthouse in downtown Geneva. Civil division officers process legal filings for attorneys, such as serving notices. They also handle property foreclosure sales.

Inmates will be moved over two days in August. Inmates now housed in other counties' facilities, due to lack of space at the present jail, will be brought to the new jail.

The county's 911 dispatch center, the fleet maintenance workers and the Office of Emergency Management will remain on the Fabyan Parkway campus.

Keaty and Perez spoke about some of the design details of the new jail. Cells will have glass doors instead of bars, and doors will be unlocked by wireless PDAs instead of keys. There will be kiosks in the housing units where inmates can look up their court dates and bond amounts and input requests.

Each housing unit will have its own visitation and recreational areas, to minimize the opportunity for inmates from different units to fight each other, as happens now when groups pass each other coming and going to those areas in the current jail.

When it opens the jail will be capable of housing up to 640 inmates in two- and eight-person cells. The current jail is designed for 400 with additional inmates housed in a gymnasium converted to a dormitory. Some inmates are sent to other counties at a cost of about $60 a day.

Perez said the old jail would not be used for overflow from the new jail. He believes if that happens it would be cheaper to rent space from another county than to supply the additional corrections officers and support staff at the Fabyan site.