By Hannah Drown
cleveland.com
ELYRIA, Ohio — Every morning in the Lorain County Jail kitchen, an inmate grabs a squeegee before breakfast.
The reason is waiting for him.
Overnight, water pools near an industrial dishwasher where aging pipes and failing drains no longer work the way they should. By morning, food scraps, bacteria and sewage odors have settled into a standing puddle. The inmate covers his uniform in plastic and pushes the water toward another drain before following with a dry mop and bleach.
“Every single day we gotta bleach it,” he said. “If we don’t, you get this God-awful smell.”
The drain can’t be practically repaired without tearing into the floor and plumbing beneath it. So, the water stays, and everyone learns to work around it.
That daily ritual has become a metaphor for much of the Lorain County Jail. Across the aging facility, leaks are contained rather than fixed, obsolete equipment is welded back together, and failing systems are patched until they fail again. The building keeps functioning largely because inmates, corrections officers and maintenance workers have learned how to compensate for problems that have become part of everyday life.
The jail opened in 1977 and was expanded in the mid-1990s. It sits on Murray Ridge Road in Elyria, a low-slung complex stretched across nearly five decades of changing crime, changing law and worsening mental illness, addiction, staffing shortages and county politics.
Two independent consulting firms have concluded the facility has outlived its useful life. State inspectors have found the jail non-compliant with standards 19 times in the last four years — most of them on issues that jail staff trace directly to the building: broken air conditioning, incorrect water temperatures, housing beyond capacity and the use of holding areas for housing.
A seven-member Lorain County Jail Advisory Board — made up of the three Lorain County commissioners, the sheriff, two judges and the clerk of courts — has reviewed the studies, toured jail facilities and debated whether Lorain County can afford to build a new jail.
In April, the board voted unanimously to build a new facility rather than rehabilitate the existing one. What remains unsettled is nearly everything else: how large it should be, what design it should follow and how much taxpayers should be asked to spend.
This is the first installment in a four-part series exploring a jail at a crossroads — and the difficult questions of public safety, human dignity, cost and political will that will shape what comes next.
Maximum security
Between the kitchen and the maximum-security unit is a long hallway lit mostly by fluorescent lights.
Along the way, it passes an outdoor recreation yard that has not been used in years — fenced, open to the sky, with basketball hoops that long ago lost their nets and weeds growing through cracks in the concrete.
Using the recreation yard requires a designated officer, and vacancies have made that impossible. Indoor recreation meets minimum standards, so the yard sits empty.
One inmate said he has not breathed outside air in more than a year.
At the end of the hall are four maximum-security pods in one of the oldest parts of the jail. The cells are smaller than current Ohio standards allow, but the state grants a variance each year, acknowledging that the cells don’t meet the requirement but permitting the jail to keep using them anyway.
Maj. James Gordon has worked in the building for 37 years — long enough to remember when the indoor day room at the center of each pod used to be an outdoor courtyard.
Years ago, he said, the cell windows looked out into a narrow hallway with a glass wall on the other side. Beyond the glass was open air. But renovations sealed it. The glass came out. A ceiling went over the center.
An inmate had once escaped from the yard by stepping onto a door handle and launching himself onto the roof. After that, the door handle was removed. When the jail population increased, the outdoor space was converted into an expanded day room.
For inmates in those pods, fresh air is no longer an option.
Instead, they rely on an aging HVAC system that can shift abruptly between extremes.
“Hell or freezing,” one inmate said. “Those are the two temperatures you get.”
Inmates describe one cell that “basically rains” when storms move through. One man, an electrician before his arrest, told cleveland.com that what unsettled him most was water seeping near electrical components — a hazard he said should never occur in a functioning facility.
Another inmate was back at the jail for a court date after spending 19 years in state prison. He said he could not wait to go back to the state penitentiary.
“Everybody’s charged with an offense,” he said. “But you shouldn’t be here under the penalty of the conditions of the jail.”
Those who clock in
For corrections officers, the facility’s failures can become dangerous in seconds.
The jail’s linear design was common in the 1970s and is now understood to produce a specific hazard — blind spots. Long corridors and corners create places where security cameras and control booth operators cannot see.
Seven years ago, officer Frank Machovina found himself in one of those places.
He was processing a newly booked inmate in a changing area that officers in the control booth could not see. The room sat around a corner, behind a wall. Machovina noticed something in the man’s eyes and left the door cracked as a precaution.
When the inmate attacked, Machovina pulled both of them into the hallway, hoping the control booth operator would see the fight. She did not. For roughly two minutes, he fought alone while the inmate tried to choke him.
“The only thing going through your head is, I’m going home,” Machovina said.
A separate officer in the special-needs unit was choked unconscious in a similar blind spot before backup arrived. The officer, a veteran of about 10 years, never returned to work.
The danger does not stop with sightlines. Lt. George Irish, a 28-year veteran, said the building itself supplies inmates with raw material for weapons. As adhesives break down and fixtures loosen, debris becomes metal or plastic for shanks.
“Because the building is falling apart,” Irish said, “you are now creating more and more dangerous situations and more abilities for weapons to be manufactured within the jail.”
Women’s housing
The women’s housing area shows the building’s limits in a different way. There, the problem is not only age. It is compression.
Gordon said the issue is capacity. When beds in the women’s dorm are full and there is no other space, the extra women are moved into boats — hard plastic cots they say cause hip pain.
At times, more than 30 women have been assigned to them at once.
They sit low to the floor throughout the common area, turning the day room into a dormitory. The beds crowd the space, forcing inmates and staff alike to navigate around them and maintain order among them.
The boats also turn recreation into a security puzzle. Women sleeping in the dayroom occupy the same space staff need to rotate classifications that cannot safely mix.
Jada Lewis, a rookie corrections officer who started in October, said what surprised her was not the danger, but the absence of space — and what that did to her authority.
“You’re forced to tolerate a lot of disrespect because there’s nowhere else to lock anyone up,” Lewis said.
The jail has four women’s isolation cells that must serve every purpose requiring separation: mental health, discipline, protective custody and medical isolation. Each cell has two beds, but women in crisis often cannot safely be doubled up. Eight beds become four.
The shortage of space follows inmates into medical care where the jail operates with a single exam room.
In 2025, medical staff distributed roughly 297,000 medications — about 813 a day. They logged more than 4,500 sick calls and 87 emergency-room transfers. All of it funneled through one room.
“We all do a very good job,” a medical worker told cleveland.com. “But we could do a better job if we had more functional space.”
While the crowding shapes daily life in obvious ways, other problems emerge more literally from the building itself.
The women have given a name to the insects emerging from the shower drains. They call them wombats.
They are small flies breeding inside aging pipes so corroded that maintenance workers say cleaning them aggressively enough to eliminate the larvae could rupture the system. So, the pipes remain. The larvae keep coming.
One woman, incarcerated for the first time on a 60-day misdemeanor sentence, said she had prepared herself for confinement. She had not prepared herself for this.
“We know it’s jail and we’re criminals,” she said. “We break the law, we lose our freedom. But we have basic human rights.”
The walls wear on everyone
The building wears on inmates. It wears on staff, too.
Jail leaders recently started a wellness program for corrections staff, including peer support, volunteer chaplains and access to a psychiatrist who specializes in corrections and law enforcement. Gordon has used parts of the program himself.
“I’ve had discouraging days,” he said, “and I needed someone to talk to who just wants to listen, and I didn’t want to bring it home.”
On those days, Gordon’s windowless office can feel like one more cell.
Sometimes he pulls up a security camera feed on his computer — not one watching a housing unit, but one pointed outside, toward the parking lot, a patch of grass and a narrow band of sky.
For years, his office, like many of the jail’s walls, has been painted a muted tan. He wants to bring some of that outside color in by repainting parts of the facility blue.
“Something simple like that makes a big difference,” Gordon said, “because you’re locked in. All you see are these walls. All day long. It wears on you.”
For the people locked inside, missing the outside is a given. Enduring the building itself is another matter.
The inmate who works in the kitchen said the mold, standing water and failing ventilation worry him less for their immediate effects than for what they might mean years after he leaves the jail.
His mother has COPD. Years from now, he said, he worries he may discover something is wrong with his lungs, too.
But he was careful not to blame the people working there.
“Jail is pretty well terrible for the inmates as well as it is for the staff itself,” he said. “It’s all patchwork, patchwork, patchwork. You just can’t patch it no more. I don’t think.”
COs: What’s the biggest challenge of working in an aging correctional facility, and what improvements would most improve officer safety?
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