An excerpt from the book, “Pensacola’s Finest,” available on Amazon
By Mike Simmons
Under Chief Hall’s direction, many changes occurred. On August 5, 1956, the new police headquarters and jail were occupied and considered open for business. The location was 40 South Alcaniz Street on the south side of St. Michael’s Cemetery. The two-story building was described by the local news as a modern crime-fighting edifice, complete with a detective bureau, a records section, and an entire jail facility which included a kitchen for cooking meals for the inmates. The north end of the building was occupied by the U. S. Navy Shore Patrol.
Some prisoners named them. The rats in the city jail became so regular that they became friends with the bored prisoners. By 1980, the city jail that took up a lot of space in the police department was old, smelly, vermin-ridden, and hot. The lighting, which existed only in the hallways, was dim. Instead of prisoners being issued jail jumpsuits daily, they simply wore their underwear due to the often 100+ degree temperature. In June 1980, local attorney Ron Shelley filed a class-action lawsuit in federal court claiming poor jail conditions and police brutality. Shelley had filed a similar lawsuit against the county jail a few months earlier. The city jail only housed pretrial detainees, and there were usually only about 20 city prisoners at any given time. Deplorable conditions, fights, a federal lawsuit, and ever-increasing mandates helped the city fathers decide what route to take. They offered to pay Escambia County $38 per inmate per day to house them. The county commissioners, whose response to the lawsuit was to build a new multi-million-dollar correctional facility, agreed. As a result, the city jail closed in early 1982, leaving the old building on Alcaniz Street as a police administrative office building only. As a whole, the jail burden felt like a weight lifted. One dark spot was losing “Miss Lucy.” Lucy Jordan, the city jail cook, was forced to resign after 17 years. Miss Lucy’s cooking was so good that some inmates looked forward to being locked up so they could eat her cooking. Officers also felt like that, since Miss Lucy cooked for them as well. An era had come to an end.
