KVIG Informative

Architects spent the early 1980s making sure downtown Las Vegas’s new jail would not look like one, wrapping it in the same glass and tinted bands as the casino towers around it. Fourteen years later, federal civil rights investigators walked through the finished building and found that the problem was never its appearance — it was what overcrowding inside had already cost in lives.

Clark County built its downtown detention center at 330 S. Casino Center Blvd. between 1981 and 1984, according to an entry in the Society of Architectural Historians’ Buildings of the United States project, which credits the firm JMA Architects working with Hellmuth, Obata and Kassabaum as designers. The finished tower rises twelve stories and holds roughly 350,000 square feet, the entry states.

The design goal, according to the same account, was a jail that would not look like one. Narrow horizontal bands of tinted, recessed windows wrap the building’s vertical cores, and glazed brick cladding with rounded corners give the structure a profile closer to the high-rise casinos and parking garages around it than to a conventional lockup. A curved canopy marks the main entrance. Underground passageways connect the jail directly to the nearby county courthouse, letting inmates move between the two buildings without appearing outside.

Donate

Donate

Fourteen years after the facility opened, the U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division opened an investigation under the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act, notifying county officials of its intent on Dec. 4, 1997. Teams of penology, mental health, correctional medicine and environmental safety experts inspected the jail during two site visits, Jan. 20-22 and Feb. 10-12, 1998, according to the Justice Department’s own findings letter, addressed to then-Clark County Commission Chairman Bruce L. Woodbury.

The inspectors found the jail holding 1,704 inmates during the January visit, with more than 200 people packed into the booking and holding area alone — a space with 17 holding rooms that facility records showed had held as many as 300 people at once, the findings letter states. Investigators documented two completed suicides in the holding area during 1997, both by hanging from a cell partition, and a death tied to a drug overdose in the same period. A 1996 suicide attempt went unanswered for several minutes while staff searched for scissors to cut a sheet, according to the letter.

Donate

Donate

The Justice Department, under then-Acting Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee, concluded that conditions in the holding area, inadequate mental health screening and suicide prevention, and deficient fire and environmental safety practices violated inmates’ constitutional rights, according to the letter. Investigators also found that negative-pressure isolation rooms in the medical unit were not maintained to reverse airflow correctly, raising the risk of airborne disease transmission. The letter named then-Sheriff Jerry Keller and then-Detention Services Deputy Chief Bill Young among the county officials copied on the findings, and gave the county 49 days before the department could sue under federal law to force changes.

The architects who designed the Clark County Detention Center solved the problem they were hired to solve: a jail in the middle of downtown’s casino corridor that a tourist could walk past without a second glance. What the building’s exterior never had to account for was what federal investigators found inside it less than a decade and a half after it opened — and no amount of glazed brick or rounded corners changes how many people a holding cell can safely hold, or how fast staff can find a pair of scissors.