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BONITA SPRINGS — A man rushes to his cell door as Sgt. David Velez passes by.

“Lieutenant! Lieutenant” he calls out with a grin.

Velez walks on.

Back at the stockade, an inmate wants to know why he hasn’t gotten a blanket. He requested it hours earlier, he says.

“They should be able to get that for you,” Velez says before walking on.

He’s used to these things.

“They’re like children. They’re needy.”

Inmates at the Lee County jail are treated like children. Guards escort them everywhere. Two take each man to the shower and one waits outside. They wake inmates each morning, feed and medicate them, and walk them to the sally port that will carry them to court and various hearings each day.

Jail is a daycare center where the adults wear forest green.

Lee County jails have grown tremendously in recent years. In 2008, the average daily population of inmates has exceeded jail beds by an average of 28 percent.

On Wednesday, Lee County will reduce that average to around 9 percent when it opens its fifth building, the four-story, eight-flight 768-bed jail expansion.

Yet record-high arrest rates, combined with few alternatives to detention in Lee County, promise a continued flood of inmates into the jail, one that could easily raise the overcrowding levels back to their current levels.

The Sheriff’s Office’s own calculations predict that by October 2009, the jail will be overcrowded by roughly 36 percent.

Lee Sheriff Mike Scott said he and county officials already are looking ahead to another facility.

“It’s like sandbagging the rising water,” Scott said of the new building. “You do what you can, but you know what’s coming.”

The new jail will join an Ortiz Avenue jail campus with three buildings: The medium-security Core facility (448 beds); the stockade, which has 400 beds and will be demolished upon completion of the new building and the Community Programs Units, a series of minimum-security white tents that run drug and education programs (384 beds).

The downtown Fort Myers jail adjacent to the Justice Center has 451 beds and holds the most violent felons.

Throughout the system, overcrowding is measured in Stack-a-Bunks, the gray plastic beds inmates sleep in when they have no cot or bunk. Stack-a-Bunks line walls of the dayrooms and the insides of the cells. On a recent visit, more than 600 of them populated the four buildings. Combined, the jails only have 1,683 permanent beds.

“It is a security issue for us,” said Capt. Tom Eberhardt, the jail commander. “One facet is you’ve got more people in an area that’s not made for it.”

Overcrowding removes distance, if not barriers, between inmates and their guards.

Inmates without a cell sleep along the dayroom walls, close to the main door. While individual cells can be locked by remote — placing two doors between deputies and inmates — only one door separates deputies from inmates sleeping in the dayroom.

Cell blocks in the new building will have a vestibule — two sets of doors before the dayroom.

Velez said the Bureau of Corrections, the Sheriff’s Office corrections arm, requested the addition.

Overcrowding occasionally can work to a deputy’s favor.

On a recent day in the Core, inmates were locked down in their cell blocks after a deputy received one less razor back than she originally handed out. Someone was holding on to the razor, and until he gave it back, 62 men were crammed into cells designed for 32.

“Believe me, that guy is not popular,” Velez said.

The Core appears clean, its floors forever dry-mopped by inmates wearing green-and-white stripes. It is air-conditioned and has video terminals inmates use to talk with family and friends.

The stockade is another story. Inmates live in 26 cell blocks with no air-conditioning and a barred door that leads outside. The doors are rusty and often unreliable, Velez said, and the occasional lightning strike has been known to unlock cell doors.

The heat can lead to fights. The overcrowding can’t help — on one recent day, stockade cell blocks averaged 23 inmates in spaces designed for 16.

High arrest numbers pushed by increased growth and more aggressive policing has placed more inmates into the jail.

Between 2005 and 2007, Cape Coral police arrest rates rose 60 percent. Lee Sheriff’s Office arrests have climbed by 48 percent in the same time.

“I promised to be aggressive,” Scott said in an interview. “I know my community. They want us to be aggressive.”

Scott became sheriff in 2005, the same time the annual county growth rate leaped to 5.1 percent. In 2004, 4.7 out of every 100 people were incarcerated in the county jail. In 2007, the rate is 5.6 out of every 100. Lee County, in the meantime, has grown by roughly 52,000 people.

Two types of arrests stick out: Drug arrests, which grew by 91 percent in Scott’s first three years, and miscellaneous arrests, which include criminal traffic violations and have grown 57 percent.

Criminal traffic violations fall in line with the policing strategy Scott has long advocated — focusing on the highways to catch criminals in the act.

“Unfortunately, in that process you get the suspended license, the revoked license, you get the guy driving a car where the judge says, ‘Buddy, you can’t drive that car,’” Scott explained.

In such a case, a suspect could be issued a notice to appear before a judge, if deputies felt confident the suspect isn’t a threat and can be kept out of jail.

Yet that’s not an easy judgment to make, Scott said, and deputies hesitate to issue a notice to appear if they don’t have thorough background information for the suspect.

“(If) you want to release somebody on the roadside, you need to know who they are,” he said.

Indeed, in 2007, notices to appear amounted to 2 percent of all Sheriff’s Office arrests.

Patrol deputies use identification software that cross-checks names and dates of birth to find photographs of a suspect. The system works well to identify an individual, Scott said, but not to check his background.

The Sheriff’s Office is installing an automated fingerprint identification system in its offices and substations. The machine reads biometrics to check all crimes associated with the print.

Scott said the new system will allow deputies to take a suspect back to a substation, check the prints and then release him or her with a notice to appear before a judge.

Another alternative to jail would be drug court, a program in which offenders are allowed to stay at home and participate in a rigorous treatment program lasting one or two years. The Lee County program, which the county fully funds, takes referrals before and after trial.

Between November 2006 and August 2008, the program made 1,519 case referrals to the State Attorney’s Office; only 242 offenders were accepted.

The program currently has 149 participants, up from an average 25 to 30 participants before 2006.

Lee County Commission Chairman Ray Judah said drug court, mental health court and other alternatives to detention need to be explored to cut the expense of jail overcrowding.

“You’ve got to have the four walls, the brick and mortar prisons ... but there is a component or percentage that is compatible, where we can restore their lives,” Judah said.

In that vein, the county is studying a new minimum-security jail alternative in which inmates are allowed to work jobs during the day and return to lockup at night.

Known as a community corrections center, the concept already has garnered $10 million in study and design fees in the latest budget, and Judah said he’d like to see it built within 5 years. The chairman wasn’t sure how large the program would be, but he’s hoping it could cut future expenses.

All signs suggest those expenses will be substantial.

The Sheriff’s Office calculations predict the jail averaging a daily population of 2,677 inmates in 2009. Just over a week ago, the average daily cost of an inmate was $63.30, according to Velez. Using that figure, the 2009 pricetag for inmate care would near $62 million.

Judging by recent trends, the cost will keep rising. In 2001 and 2002, the average daily cost for an inmate was about $49, nearly $14 less than today.

It’s such staggering statistics that Scott said will keep perspective at Wednesday’s ribbon-cutting at the new jail building. The event, he said, will be a “bittersweet deal.”

“To think that (the new building) is not covering us for the next 10 or 15 years is a shame,” he said. “But it’s not.”