Navajo Nation ( New Jail to open - Tuba city opens in February )

Jails opening soon in Tuba City, Crownpoint

By Bill Donovan
Special to the Times

WINDOW ROCK, December 13, 2012

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(Special to the Times – Donovan Quintero)

The Tuba City Detention Center begins to take shape in Tuba City. The new detention center will house 132 inmates from all over the reservation and will have a grand opening on February 15.

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T he Navajo Nation is just three months away from having something it hasn't had in more than five decades - a decent jail system.Work is on schedule currently to open two new jails, one in Tuba City, Ariz. and another in Crownpoint, N.M.
"This is very exciting," said Delores Greyeyes, director of corrections for the division.
It's been her burden to maintain the tribe's existing jails, all of which have had problems and had to have major renovations at various times during the past decade.
But renovations could only go so far and as the tribe battled problems with overcrowding and a court order edict to keep jail populations at a certain level, efforts to get funding for new jails just didn't seem to go anywhere.
But that changed with the recent downturn in the national economy and the decision by the new president Barack Obama to spend more than $800 billion on stimulus projects to get people back to work.
As a result the tribe received $67 million to build a 132-bed facility at Tuba City. The Bureau of Indian Affairs kicked in some money that is allowing the building a smaller jail in Crownpoint for $48 million.
For a reservation that has seen unemployment rates hang around the 50 percent mark now for more than two decades, the opening of the jails means a lot of new jobs.
Greyeyes is now working with the tribe's office of workforce development to fill those positions, but said Tuesday, that it has been hard to find enough Navajo applicants who have the prerequisite one-year experience as a security.
As a result, she said, some of the people who have been accepted will have to go through extra training provided by the tribe to meet that requirement.
It has helped that the tribe has agreed to up the beginning salary for corrections personnel with the starting pay in the $30,000 range.
"With benefits, you are looking at about $38,000 a year," she said.