Advocates offer input on outdoor recreation for Centre County jail. What could change?

The Centre County Correctional Facility in Benner Township is now one step closer to getting actual outdoor recreation after holding a highly-anticipated design meeting Thursday.

Co-hosted at the jail by the Centre County Commissioners and the county’s board of prison inspectors, the meeting offered 19 outdoor recreation advocates a chance to critique the correctional facility’s current recreation setup and share their ideas for improvements.

Advocates have said the jail has an inadequate outdoor activity space, which can negatively impact inmates’ mental, physical and emotional health.

Brian Endler, the assistant vice president of TranSystems Corporation Consultants of Pennsylvania, the company conducting the county’s outdoor recreation feasibility study, led the meeting and shared his and the study’s intentions: to explore “all possibilities of recreation” at the facility.

“We’re holding this (meeting) before anything else in the feasibility study because we wanted to hear from you first about what you might want outdoor recreation to look like here,” Endler said. “All ideas are being considered.”

The jail currently operates six recreation yards — two 975-square-foot yards, and four 695-square-foot yards. The yards are entirely indoors aside from a large, grated window about seven feet up the wall allowing limited fresh air and light into the room. The window can be opened or closed at the request of the inmates, with weather permitting. Basketball, volleyball, wall-ball and cornhole can all be played there. But not much else.

The yards, which were classified as “urban recreation yards” by Endler due to their lack of outside access, each qualify as an outdoor space under Pennsylvania law, which also dictates that each inmate be entitled to “at least two hours daily, physical exercise in the open, weather permitting.”

What advocates hope will be built at the facility in the future are what Endler calls “traditional outdoor recreation yards,” or actual outdoor yards with access to grass, fresh air, direct contact to sunlight and a clear, horizontal view.

Where the jail can fit an outdoor yard is another story, as the building’s unique design and several on-property obstacles make it tough to find a spot — but not impossible.

Endler and his team identified four potential areas that an outdoor yard could go: in one of two small fields located to the west and north of the correctional facility; in the grassy, fenced-in area between the facility and the road that encircles it; or in the grassy, cove-like spaces created by fluctuations in the building’s outer walls.

After the options were presented, the conversation was turned over to the advocates, who were asked to provide ideas and options for what they’d like to see brought there — and most wanted to see an end to the “urban yards” that limit fresh air and sunlight.

“The outdoor yard provides most of the things that the urban yard doesn’t,” added Jenna Henry, a Ferguson Township resident who was formerly incarcerated in the facility.

Advocate Mark Kissling agreed, offering a scathing review of the jail’s current recreation setup: “If the current yards were built with punishment in mind, not rehabilitation, then they’re great.”

Some of the advocates’ ideas included installing a retractable ceiling or a skylight on the roof of the current yards so that sunlight could be let in, installing more windows to the current yards and installing clear or one-way windows in the inmates’ cells. (The cells’ current windows are frosted and cannot be seen out of.)

One of the most popular ideas among the advocates was to install doors in the urban yards that lead to one of the outside cove-like spaces, as the two areas share a wall.

From there, to make sure that the space would be in accordance with state law, additional security fencing would need to be put up, and an overhead mesh net would need to be installed so that outside contraband couldn’t be thrown in.

“We saw something similar to that when we toured the Union County jail,” said Ken Kline Smeltzer, a Harris Township resident who originally helped bring the issue to the attention of the county’s prison board around three years ago. “The overhead mesh net seemed to work well for them and the incarcerated there seemed to enjoy the space. They had access to vegetation, a decent view, sunlight. ... It was nice.”

Now that the design meeting has been held, Endler and his team will move into the feasibility study’s next phase: concept development.

Using the ideas that were brought up at Thursday’s meeting as a reference, Endler and his team will look to create as many concepts for recreation improvement at the correctional facility as possible. Once the concepts are finalized, they will be put into a study document to be presented to the prison board in June.

After receiving the board’s feedback, Endler and his team will make last-minute adjustments to the concepts and present one final study document to the board in July.

While it’s up to the commissioners and the prison board to determine whether to pursue any of the to-be-presented options, the advocates remain hopeful of positive change.

“This is about three steps further than we’ve ever gotten this process before, so I’m feeling all right,” Ferguson Township resident and advocate Tyson Daniels said. “Hopefully they see the benefits that real outdoor recreation brings and, in the future, maybe we’ll see some being built.”