County Enters New Era with Dedication of Jail

Sheriff Mike Gardner dates the beginning of the massive red brick building standing along the Blountville Bypass to July 8, 1977, when he first asked for an expanded Sullivan County jail.

Since then, he and other county officials have made repeated trips to the Sullivan County Commission asking that something be done to relieve conditions U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Hull later would rule unconstitutionally cruel and inhumane.

Saturday, the county dedicated its new 221-bed, 55,000 square-foot jail, bringing an end to its history of housing adult prisoners in a jail the state and federal government did not consider suitable, and one that has been a source of serious inmate complaints since the mid-1970s.

Calling the new jail an “imposing addition” to the county’s criminal justice system, Commissioner Margaret DeVault, who is chairman of the jail committee, said the facility was made possible through planning, deliberation, and “much encouragement from the federal court in Greeneville.”

DeVault said she expects the jail ‘‘to be a solution to many of the problems that have plagued the sheriff and the county,” and will make Sullivan County “a leader in providing facilities to serve our criminal justice system.”

Despite 10 years of discussion on building the jail, and initial plans by Allen Dryden and Associates that are nearly as old, construction did not begin until June 1986. The jail, however, is finished two months ahead of schedule, and prisoners are expected to move in by mid-September.

Early efforts to build the new jail were frustrated by commissioners who were not anxious to raise taxes to “make the life of the criminal more comfortable,”’ as Commissioner A.B. Arrington put it in 1981.

But in 1985, commissioners, aware of a pending federal court case contesting jail conditions, voted 14-6 to approve a $4.5 million bond issue for renovation and expansion of the old jail.

When bids came in higher than expected, the jail committee changed the project and called for construction of a new jail.

The conditions that eventually would prompt court intervention when sanitary problems combined with overcrowded cells made the jail unconstitutional were evident as early as 1975.

Following a February 1975 tour of the jail, a Times-News reporter wrote, ‘‘The cell blocks are unclean, bug infested and inmates show the evidence of bug bites on their bodies. The plumbing is bad, commodes overflow and the mess is not cleaned up.”

A petition written by prisoners about the same time says, “The roaches are so bad that you can’t eat without them falling off the ceiling into ‘your food.”

The new jail is funded by a $1 million state grant and a bond issue, which will be paid off using money Sullivan County receives from the state for keeping state prisoners, Gardner said.