House of Correction reaches special mile ‘stone’

JESSUP — Inmates working on the deconstruction of the former Maryland House of Correction have reached the goal of saving and collecting 100,000 bricks.

The target was part of the contract with the company helping to take down the 135-year-old facility in the effort to reuse the bricks for public projects. The company pulled down the walls and backhoes collected the bricks.

For this – the largest Public Safety Works project in the history of DPSCS – some of the 150 inmates trained to bring down the House scraped off the mortar so the bricks can be reused.  “The significance is that this is one of the goals that the secretary outlined from the first day of the project,” said Gary Hornbaker, former warden of the facility and project manager. “That’s a lot of bricks.”

The bricks age in range from the 1800s to 1955. Many have been donated to communities for gateway signs, but they have been employed for several unique projects, too, such as building a memorial to law enforcement officers at the North Branch Correctional Institution.

Once collected by the inmates, the bricks were placed on pallets and shrink wrapped. The workers have collected 200 pallets. “They’re used for everything in public works projects,” Hornbaker said.

About 90 percent of all materials recovered during the project have been reused or recycled, keeping them out of Maryland landfills.