By George Hunter
The Detroit News
DETROIT — Detroit Police officials recently hired the first of dozens of civilian employees who will be needed to staff the Detroit Detention Center after July 31, when the Michigan Department of Corrections plans to withdraw from an agreement to manage the east-side facility that houses about 200 inmates.
The MDOC has operated the former Mound Correctional Facility on Mound Road at E. Davison since 2013, under a non-binding interagency agreement that stipulates the state must give 90 days’ notice to exit the deal. Detroit Police officials said they were told of the change last year, with the state making the decision in October.
Before the state took over the detention facility 12 years ago, pre-trial arrestees in Detroit were confined in the city’s police precinct lockup areas, and in cells on the 8th and 9th floors of the former Detroit Police Headquarters at 1300 Beaubien in downtown Detroit. During the first quarter of 2025, the Detroit Detention Center housed an average of more than 1,500 detainees per month, police officials said.
The MDOC’s stewardship of Detroit’s detention operations was credited with helping the police department end 11 years of federal oversight in 2014. The city entered into three consent decrees in 2003 to settle a civil rights lawsuit by the U.S. Department of Justice that alleged DPD had a systemic practice of “subjecting individuals to … excessive force, false arrests, illegal detentions and unconstitutional conditions of confinement.”
But corrections department officials decided last year to end the agreement to manage the facility that houses about 150 males and 50 females, MDOC spokeswoman Jenni Riehle told The Detroit News.
“MDOC is currently in discussions with the City of Detroit to transition the operation of the Detroit Detention Center to the City of Detroit on or about July 31 , 2025,” Riehle said in an email. “The DDC was opened on Aug. 1, 2013, and operates under an interagency agreement between the Detroit Police Department and MDOC. At the last review of the interagency agreement in Oct. 2024 , it was determined that the City of Detroit should resume the management of city detainees, an operation typically overseen by police departments.”
Detroit Police officials said about 10 Detention Facility Officers were hired Friday, with more than 60 more positions to fill. The city in December posted the opening for Detention Facility Officers, with a starting annual salary range of $33,456-$39,852.
“This won’t take one officer off the street,” Detroit Police Chief Todd Bettison said. “The DDC will be staffed by Detention Facility Officers and other (civilian employees).
“We’ll hire the same number of employees for the DDC as the MDOC has now,” Bettison said. “I just met with the warden Friday and did a walk-through; we’re working with the Office of Procurements and Contracting for things like food services, medical staff —everything that’s provided now by the MDOC, we’ll have to bid that out to ensure no services are lost once the MDOC leaves.”
Riehle said there are approximately 73 MDOC employees operating the DDC.
“The department has been working with the unions and impacted employees on employment opportunities at other MDOC worksites in accordance with collective bargaining agreements and civil service regulations,” she said.
The Michigan Corrections Organization, the union that represents MDOC guards, did not respond Tuesday to a phone call and email seeking comment. Detroit’s new Detention Facility Officers will be represented by the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1023 , according to the city’s job posting.
Detroit paid the MDOC about $11.8 million to run the detention center in fiscal year 2025, Detroit Police officials said. That included a $1.6 million hike from the previous year, “to support higher than anticipated costs for operations ... including contracted nursing costs and contracted janitorial costs,” according to a summary of the 2024/25 MDOC budget by the House Fiscal Agency .
In November, the city extended the pact by six months, agreeing to pay the state about $1 million a month. The deal, which was extended twice, expires July 31 .
The city likely will break even after stopping payments to the MDOC and using those funds to run the Detention Center itself, said Nevrus Nazarko the police department’s Chief Financial Officer.
“We’ll just reallocate that money, which is in the budget, over to the personnel and operating costs of the DDC,” Nazarko said. “We anticipate that it’ll be a wash at this point. We have no information to indicate otherwise.”
Discussions for Detroit Police to take over the detention facility were had for about three years before the state formally made the decision in October, Nazarko said.
“DPD discussed other possibilities — maybe having Wayne County look at running (the detention center), or hiring a third party,” Nazarko. “Now, we’re geared toward doing it in-house.”
Nazarko said while the city is hiring Detention Facility Officers, other staff like medical and janitorial personnel will temporarily continue working under their existing contracts. One of the DDC’s vendors is Script Guide RX, Inc. of Grosse Pointe Park, which last year was awarded a two-year, $180,000 contract to provide pharmaceutical services to the facility.
MDOC officials told The News in 2015 that the DDC saved taxpayers in Wayne County and Detroit $20 million a year, mostly in medical costs. Rather than transporting inmates to the hospital for minor issues at a cost of $4,000 each, the DDC has medical staff on-site.
The move to take over the DDC “has a lot of moving parts,” Assistant Detroit Police Chief Eric Ewing said. “It’s not like we can just move in, like buying a house. There’s contracts, hiring, training — it all needs to be taken into consideration.”
The state of the Detroit Police lockup facilities was one of the problems that prompted the federal consent decrees. The DOJ investigation found crumbling holding cells that were often smeared with feces and infested with vermin.
Former Detroit Police Chief James White told The News in 2023: “Centralizing the lockups at the DDC was one of the biggest things to come out of the consent judgment. We could never get into compliance because the precincts were old, the infrastructure wasn’t solid, and we had problems with heating, cooling and food delivery. It was a game-changer to get out of the jailing business because it allowed us to close out that portion of the consent judgment, and allowed us to deploy the officers who’d been guarding those cells to the street.”
When the Detroit Detention Center opened in August 2013, a year after the facility closed as an MDOC state prison, Detroit Police officials said the move would free up 40 to 50 officers who’d been assigned to guard the lockup facilities for street patrols.
The transition to the DDC wasn’t always smooth, with Detroit Police officers grumbling that arrests that formerly took only a few minutes were lasting hours, since officers in distant parts of the city had to drive across town and go through a lengthy processing procedure.
MDOC changed its policy two months after taking over the DDC, after Detroit cops complained state employees were patting them down when they brought prisoners into the facility.
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