GRAND FORKS — The $38 million Grand Forks County detention center expansion project is on track for early completion, according to a senior project manager with the company tasked with building it. It includes a new juvenile center and an expansion of the adult correctional center.
The juvenile center replaces an outdated facility and provides 16 beds for non-secure youth and 16 beds for secure detention. The adult expansion adds 72 new beds in a medium-security dormitory-style configuration. The project began in July 2023, and is expected to be completed three months early, in May 2025. ICON Architectural Group and HDR worked together on designing the project.
“It’s all under one roof tied into the existing building, and it goes into four quadrants. So the new youth assessment center, the juvenile facility, is a complete replacement of the existing juvenile center that’s in a very old building that is no longer able to be maintained. It needs a replacement,” said Ben Matson, senior project manager with Construction Engineers. “It was the former Grand Forks County jail before this (current) jail was built in 2005.”
The juvenile facility and correctional center are counted as one project by the county, though they are required to be separate and distinct facilities under state law. The county has known since 2018 the correctional center was overcrowded and in need of facilities like mental health housing, a medical infirmary and more space for female prisoners, the Grand Forks Herald reported.
The new juvenile facility building includes an administration area for staff and will house their attendant care and shelter care programs, which provides 16 beds for non-secure youth to be housed, Matson said. The adult correctional expansion also includes an administration area, locker rooms for officers, break rooms and typical office settings.
“A fourth component of the addition is the housing pod, which is a medium security dormitory-style housing for detained residents,” Matson said. “There’s eight dormitories in there, plus exercise rooms and interview rooms. A total of 72 new beds for Grand Forks County are going in there.
“The existing jail, I believe, is all single cell, maybe double bunk, but all cells, no dormitory style. This gives more of that medium security where you have larger groups of housing. Once the admin area moves out into the new admin area, we’re going to do a renovation of their existing admin area, locker room area, which will give the county a new medical infirmary area,” he said. “If they need to do exams on site, medical, dental, those types of things, it can stay on-site versus having to take them somewhere off property.”
The perimeter of the building generally contains in-floor heat — the offices and those adjacent spaces. Even the housing in the juvenile center has some radiant heat coming from the floor, which is an efficient way to heat the space without wasting a lot of energy, he explained.
“Correctional center projects take a lot of collaboration with the architects and owners to make sure the owners are getting what they want, and the architects are specifying the right products for that,” Matson said.
“Jails aren’t always looked on favorably. Nobody wants them in their backyard, or wants to spend the money on them,” Matson said. “But I think the real good thing we saw out of this one was that we were able to find efficiencies because we tied into an existing building. Construction Engineers was part of the original construction, we were the general contractor on the building that was built in 2005-2006. At that time, everything was designed with expansion in mind.
“It was nice to see that the county planned for future expansion so we didn’t need to put in four new boilers or expand a fire system or a hydronic system. It was already all there, piped in. We’re able to tie into that and utilize things and really capitalize on the thought that went into everything 20 years ago. So it’s a win.”
The Grand Forks County Correctional Center is situated just east of the River Cities Speedway on North Washington Street.