The District is positioned to take its most significant step toward replacing its aging jail, amid increased scrutiny of its detention conditions and years after experts began calling for a new facility.

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       D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s capital budget proposal, which she unveiled this month, allocates more than $250 million over six years to design and build an annex to the Correctional Treatment Facility, which is a slightly newer part of the D.C. jail where women and some men in minimum security are detained. Bowser said the annex will pave the way to permanently shutter the adjacent Central Detention Facility, which was built in 1976.

       Ultimately, District leadership has said, the city hopes to create a “single facility solution” to house its incarcerated population and bring back people who have been serving sentences in federal custody since the city’s last prison closed in 2001.

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       “What we are all focused on in the District is how to make that facility one where our residents can be rehabilitated, receive the treatment that they need, and, most importantly,” Bowser (D) said at a news conference Monday, “come back home.”

       The commitment to break ground on an annex comes after a fraught year for the Department of Corrections. In October, the U.S. Marshals Service conducted a surprise inspection at the jail and reported conditions so substandard that it ordered 400 defendants facing federal charges transferred to Pennsylvania. That announcement attracted national attention — especially as defendants charged in the Capitol riot mounted a publicity campaign against the jail’s conditions — and renewed long-simmering calls from local lawmakers and advocates to demolish the Central Detention Facility and replace it with a building geared toward rehabilitation.

       The capital budget proposal appears, in large part, to follow recommendations made by the District Task Force on Jails and Justice, an independent advisory board convened in 2019 to outline a correctional plan for the city. The task force’s most recent report, published in February 2021, suggested that the city construct an annex by fiscal 2027, demolish the Central Detention Facility and build a new main jail by fiscal 2030.

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       At the Monday news conference, Bowser said the city has “taken a lot of feedback from a number of sources,” spent years considering its options and “landed in a really good place” on the plan.

       In the budget proposal, Bowser allocated $500,000 for designing the annex in the upcoming fiscal year and projected that construction would begin in December 2023. The most significant funding for construction-related costs, however, is not allocated until fiscal 2026.

       D.C. Council member Charles Allen (D-Ward 6), who chairs the council’s judiciary committee and serves on the jails and justice task force, praised Bowser for the “important symbolic and real investment.” He recognized that the planning process would take time and said he would “love to see if there are ways to move” up the timeline of construction.

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       At a budget oversight hearing last week, Emily Tatro, the deputy director of the Council for Court Excellence, which facilitated the task force, pressed city leadership to commit to completing the entirety of the task force’s proposal. In addition to building a nontraditional main facility, the proposal calls for accommodations to drastically reduce the population of incarcerated people and transfer those serving felony convictions in Bureau of Prisons custody back to the District.

       “We need to know they are committed to decarceration and community investment, which are really necessary to achieve the goals that this facility lays out,” she said.

       Acting Department of Corrections director Thomas Faust at the hearing said the city was working toward “a smaller correctional footprint,” adding, “we are talking about a system, not just a building.”

       Faust on Monday said the new facility would have increased physical space dedicated to educational and vocational programming. The annex would house as many as 1,000 people, Faust said.

       The District is not alone in rethinking its system. The nation is now a half-century removed from the “tough on crime” era that inspired a boom in prison and jail construction, and many of the policies and practices from that time have since been dismissed as racist and counterproductive. Over the past few decades, elected officials across the country have passed laws reversing mandatory minimum sentences and launching rehabilitation programs to address the socioeconomic root causes of crime. But the thousands of expensive and expansive buildings that house inmates have been slower to change.

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       “These are now facilities that are more than 30 years old, and that has really sparked a lot of discussion in a lot of jurisdictions about building new jails,” said Andrea Armstrong, a professor of law at Loyola University in New Orleans and an expert on prison and jail conditions.

       In D.C., there have been discussions about a new corrections facility since at least 2015, when the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs published a report describing “alarming conditions” at the jail that included infestations of vermin and mold growth. This year’s budget proposal signaled the most significant investment in a new facility in recent history.

       “I was really pleasantly surprised by her budget,” said Washington Lawyers’ Committee Executive Director Jonathan Smith. “This is a big deal.”

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       Smith said he will be looking for the mayor to follow through by quickly hiring a design firm and continuing with community engagement. But he urged the city to take swift action on revising its criminal code before designing and constructing a new detention facility. Changes to sentencing and parole policies, for example, could significantly reduce the number of people incarcerated in the District, he said.

       Faust could not give an exact date for the start of design or construction work, but he said the timeline in the mayor’s proposed budget is reasonable.

       “Even though there has been a lot of work in the past, we are moving toward reality now,” he said. “We have one opportunity to get it right here.”