Mike Sheldon, director of the Las Vegas Detention and Enforcement Department, poses at his home Friday. Sheldon is retiring after 25 years with the department. Photo by K.M. Cannon.

The city jail consisted of little more than a few former Army barracks when Mike Sheldon began his career in the Las Vegas Detention and Enforcement Department nearly 25 years ago.

"We had about 40 employees and about 40 prisoners," Sheldon, 56, said with a chuckle.

Now, as Sheldon prepares to retire as the department's director, it employs about 500 people, including city marshals, corrections and animal control officers. The jail on Stewart Avenue, between Mojave and Pecos roads, houses 1,400 prisoners.

"I was part of the original team that orchestrated its (the jail's) development, and since then we've evolved from a jail to a full-fledged police agency," he said.

Handling that phenomenal growth has been the biggest challenge of Sheldon's career, which officially ends Monday.

"This community has grown so fast, I don't think anybody ever successfully keeps up," Sheldon said on Friday. "We catch up, but I don't think we ever keep up."

He has had to deal with jail overcrowding, especially a few years ago when Las Vegas police implemented a controversial crackdown on misdemeanor street crime in the downtown area. The crackdown also led to mandatory overtime for guards and contributed to low employee morale. Because of it, in 2004 Sheldon asked and was allowed to hire dozens of additional officers.

Critics of the crackdown argued that police indirectly had made homelessness illegal by focusing on vagrancy crimes to clean up downtown. Advocates for the homeless and civil rights leaders long have claimed that the city and its marshals unfairly target and harass homeless people.

"It's a real catch-22," Sheldon said. "We (city marshals) only intervene when somebody commits a crime, but we're painted with a broad brush like every other police officer in the valley. Every time we intervene, even though a crime has been committed, we're said to be harassing homeless people. It's never our intent to harass somebody for being homeless."

Marshals have to enforce the laws even if they don't agree with them, Sheldon said.

"There are some ordinances I agree with and some I don't," he added.

Sheldon also had to deal with claims of sexual discrimination and harassment at the jail in the 1990s. Female officers said their complaints about unsafe working conditions were ignored by supervisors, a claim Sheldon disputed at the time.

"Occasionally, you have those things come up," he said Friday. "We've had very few of them."

In the late 1990s, some Las Vegas police began questioning the need for city marshals, saying the marshals were expensive and had begun overstepping their original jurisdiction, which involved enforcing laws in city parks and buildings and working with the city's Neighborhood Response unit.

But outgoing Sheriff Bill Young said city marshals have maintained a long, positive working relationship with local police officers.

"City marshals do a lot of great work with us and for us," he said. "They handle some jobs that are sometimes perceived as not being that glamorous, particularly the stuff that goes on in city parks. It certainly allows Metro to focus on more violent and serious crimes."

The city jail is responsible for housing misdemeanor offenders, but it also at times has housed federal inmates, U.S. Marshals Service prisoners and others.

"We still have a couple hundred county inmates," Sheldon said.

Sheldon first began working for the department as its deputy chief but became its director after only a year. He said his proudest achievement was surrounding himself with the best employees.

"If I did anything smart my whole career, it was to surround myself with people who were more charismatic than I was. The majority of employees all pitched in."

Former department deputy chief Karen Coyne was chosen in April to replace Sheldon.

He predicted that Coyne's biggest challenge, as his was, will be handling phenomenal growth.

"At some point (she) will have to find some land and some money to construct more space," he said. "We are running out of room."