An account was already registered with this email. Please check your inbox for an authentication link.
Never miss a thing!
Sign up for our free newsletters and get the best of QCity Metro delivered to your inbox.
Support our work
We believe Black-owned media is vital to building healthy, Black communities. When you support the work of QCity Metro, you also support the communities we serve.
Just months after they voted to slashed funding for schools, Mecklenburg County commissioners agreed Tuesday to move forward with plans to build a new 1,700-bed jail.
The detention center could cost taxpayers as much as $240 million and further limit school construction, commissioners say.
Supporters say the jail is needed to relieve overcrowding in current facilities. At times, hundreds of inmates are forced to sleep on the floor. County leaders say they hope part of the jail will be ready as early as 2014.
Plans for the jail are sure to renew the classic debate: Is government money better spent on books or prisons.
Commissioner Dumont Clarke was quoted in the Charlotte Observer as saying the cost of building the jail “is going to make it much more difficult, really almost impossible, for us to build schools at the same rate that we were hoping to do and other needed government facilities.”
Commissioners voted 6-2 to proceed. Democrats Dan Murrey and Vilma Leake voted no.
