D.C. could have the funding to tear down part of its troubled jail complex and replace it with a new facility over the next six years, according to an overview of Mayor Muriel Bowser’s proposed budget released on Wednesday. The proposed funding in the city’s capital budget marks the most significant step Bowser has taken towards updating the city’s jail, even though officials have discussed the need for a new facility for years.

Advocates for a modern, smaller facility in the District greeted the news with measured optimism — but noted that it would take more than new buildings to improve the city’s criminal justice system and ensure that people detained in the city’s jail won’t be subject to abuse.

“It’s something that … we have been working on for so long and really weren’t sure was going to make it into the budget,” said Emily Tatro, deputy director of the Council for Court Excellence, which led a city-funded task force that sought community input on the future of the D.C. Jail and recommended a newer and more treatment and programming-focused facility. “It’s so important to make sure that people who we decide do have to be incarcerated aren’t living in the conditions and the culture at the current [Department of Corrections] facilities. So we were really excited to see that this initial investment was being made.”

Bowser has not released the full details of her budget proposal, but the summary and capital budget proposal released Wednesday contains $250 million, spread over the next six years, to design and build an annex to the side of the jail complex called the Correctional Treatment Facility. The annex, according to the overview, will have enough space to house up to 600 people, and will be a “major step” towards closing the Central Detention Facility (CDF), the older side of the D.C. jail complex, from where incarcerated residents have alleged some of the most serious complaints.

Construction of the annex likely wouldn’t begin until at least 2026, because the majority of the $250 million in the proposed 6-year capital plan is budgeted for fiscal year 2027 and 2028.

The proposed budget, according to the overview, will also include $25 million to “maintain safe, secure, and humane conditions” at the Central Detention Facility until it can ultimately be closed.

The announcement of a new jail facility as a near-term priority comes after months of increased scrutiny on conditions at the D.C. Jail. The U.S. Marshals Service conducted a surprise inspection of the facilities in October and found the conditions in the Central Detention Facility side of the complex to be so unacceptable that they transferred about 200 people in their custody out of the jail and sent them to be held in federal prisons instead. A memo the Marshals Service issued after the inspection described cell toilets clogged with human waste, guards punitively withholding food and water from jail residents, and other abuses.

D.C. officials have disputed the claims in the Marshals Service memo, though defense attorneys, incarcerated D.C. residents, and other advocates have corroborated them and said conditions at the jail have been unacceptable for years. In 2015, the Washington Lawyers’ Committee issued a report that said conditions at the jail were so bad they “could not be realistically fixed” without tearing it down and starting over. A year later, during the summer of 2016, a 70-year-old man died during a heat wave at the jail. Corrections officials said the heat was not the man’s cause of death, but residents of the jail reported at the time that their cells were extremely hot, in one case reaching a temperature of 87 degrees.

In recent months, when pressed by reporters and lawmakers, officials said they believed the city needs a new facility but declined to provide a timeline for one.

Tatro noted that while the newly-announced commitment to building an updated facility was a “really good first step and a good commitment,” a new building would not fix all of the problems at the jail, like the reports from the Marshals Service of people being deprived of food and water as punishment.

“That’s not going to change with the new building,” said Tatro. “That’s something that needs to change about the culture.”

“The whole system is broken,” said Julie Johnson, a core team member of the group Neighbors for Justice, a group of residents who live near the jail and advocate for changes to the local criminal justice system. “So a new facility or a new director of [the Department of Corrections] — any new individual thing is not sufficient because the whole system is broken and does not respect the humanity of individuals.”

And while city officials have so far committed to a facility that looks and feels different than the existing one – City Administrator Kevin Donahue even went as far as to describe it as a “treatment and rehabilitation facility” on Wednesday – some advocates have expressed skepticism about what the end product will be, in reality. Johnson said she wants officials to take the time and gather input about best practices before simply building a new facility that functions like other jails.

“We know that we need a facility, but we don’t want it to just be built in a traditional fashion,” said Johnson. “And the problem is that apparently over the past decades, every new facility was supposed to not feel like a jail. And even though [the Correctional Treatment Facility] is better than [the Central Detention Facility], it still is a jail.”

The next step in the budget process brings Bowser’s proposal to the Council, which has until May 24 to propose changes to it. On Wednesday, during a meeting where Bowser announced the budget overview, several D.C. Councilmembers praised her decision to commit to a new facility.

Ward 6 Councilmember Charles Allen, who leads the Council’s committee on public safety, called the funding for the new facility “an incredibly significant event.”

“It’s not just the physical space, which we all know is unacceptable as it is,” said Allen. “It really provides an opportunity for investment in a rehabilitation-focused criminal justice system that makes our city safer, and addresses the ongoing liability that exists every day that the current facility exists.”

“We’ve put a lot of money in terms of band-aids around maintenance, and it’s now time for a facility that meets our goals,” said at-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson.

The concept of the annex seems to draw directly from a set of recommendations outlined by the city-funded Jails and Justice Task Force last year. The group, which included lawmakers, advocates, and law enforcement, formed in 2019 and was charged with coming up with a plan to replace the city’s aging jails and re-envision its criminal system. During the process, they surveyed nearly 2,000 D.C. residents and conducted a survey of people from D.C. who were currently incarcerated in federal prisons.

The group ended up coming up with a list of 80 recommendations – among them, building the annex next to the Correctional Treatment Facility so that the city could close the Central Detention Facility by 2027. The task force proposed that the city build an additional correctional facility by 2031, and eventually tear down the Correctional Treatment Facility too. It also proposed that the new facilities be “non-traditional,” designed to facilitate programming rather than punishment – and used only as a “last resort” when community-based alternatives to incarceration are “insufficient, inappropriate, or infeasible.”

And, notably, it proposed that the District bring all of its prisoners back from the Bureau of Prisons to be housed in the new District-based facility. Currently, D.C. residents who are given longer prison sentences are sent to serve their time in federal facilities that may be far away from their home because of an agreement the D.C. government made with the federal government in the 1990s.

On Wednesday, Bowser officials did not commit to the return of those currently being held in federal facilities, but City Administrator Kevin Donahue told the D.C. Council that building the new annex would allow the city to bring some of them back to D.C. early, “to be able to be in D.C. before their release from incarceration.”

Anthony Petty, another core team member of Neighbors for Justice, told DCist/WAMU that he believes making space for all of D.C.’s incarcerated population should be a priority.

“If we’re going to build just a prison, why not build a prison for the whole D.C. population?” said Petty, who has served time in federal prisons and says Black D.C. residents are routinely discriminated against in the federal system. “Bring all the guys that’s in Florida, California, West Virginia, Kentucky. Let’s bring all our individuals home. I think that’s one of the things that we need to speak about.”

The task force also said that in order to build a reasonably-sized new correctional facility, the city would need to reduce the number of residents it incarcerates by half. To do so, it recommended increased mental and behavioral health staff in public schools, a community center to support people with behavioral health needs, more affordable housing for returning citizens, and a restorative justice community center where conflicts could be solved without resorting to incarceration. It also outlined sweeping changes to charging, sentencing, and parole that the city has yet to implement — like extensive revisions to the city’s criminal code that are still under D.C. Council consideration, and significant changes to the way that youth and young adults are sentenced.

“It’s not just inside the walls” of a jail, said Tatro. “It’s making sure that we really are making those big upfront investments to make sure people aren’t in crisis as often and that there’s not as much violence happening and that we have more reparative, more healing ways to address it when it does happen. So we’re really hanging on to the big picture here. This is one really exciting win, but it’s the whole package and we’re not going to be able to achieve the goals that we want of safety for everyone without moving the whole package.”