Fayette County officials working to transition old jail annex into juvenile detention facility

Fayette County officials say not having a juvenile detention center has been an expensive struggle. They have to take underage offenders to other counties hours away.

“You have to have two deputies in the car with the juvenile,” Commissioner Scott Dunn said. “That could be five hours out, five hours back. That’s 20 man hours just for one trip.”

“It’s getting to the point where it’s outrageous,” District Attorney Mike Aubele said. “We need to have something done here.”

With the Shuman Center in Allegheny County closed and not yet reopened, and the Westmoreland County Juvenile Detention Center having recent staffing struggles and a temporary closure last year, there aren’t a lot of places locally to house juvenile offenders.

Fayette County wants to change that.

They want to transform the old county jail annex into a juvenile detention facility.

“It already is a jail. It’s already zoned as a jail. It’s already built. There are already cameras. There’s already security inside. The problem with the building right now is that it’s not set up for a juvenile detention facility,” Dunn said.

The county is partnering with George Junior Republic, a third-party non-profit company that operates a similar facility in Grove City to redesign the building and run the facility when it opens.

They have to change it from a dorm-style building, build separate rooms and make more changes in line with an underage population.

“It’s up to George Junior to have their staff, to have this facility ready to go,” Dunn said.

The cost to remodel is about $800,000. The county got half of that through a grant from the Department of Human Services.

The initial plan is to have 12 beds, with the opportunity to expand to 15 beds.

Aubele said it’s beyond worth it for everyone involved.

“When it’s all said and done, we’re going to have our juveniles here at home where they’re facing charges, where they’re going through programming, we’ll have their families available to them,” he said. “It’ll be a much more streamlined process.”

Dunn said he’d like to see the old jail annex operating as a juvenile detention center by the end of the year but said that’s just a “ballpark estimate.”

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