Newton County completed a new jail in 1901 after local criticism of the older one-story jail behind the courthouse as unfit. Designed by J. W. Golucke and Company of Atlanta and built by the Pauly Jail Building and Manufacturing Company of St. Louis, Missouri, the new building stood at Stallings Street and Court Place, with a three-story central tower, reinforced concrete floors and ceiling in the jail section, six second-floor cells, and an adjacent gallows room with a trap door, although no record of a hanging there has been found. Its front half was designed as a home for the sheriff or a staff member and his family, a common arrangement of the period, and the sheriff was responsible for feeding prisoners, often from his kitchen stove, while a garden on the lot produced vegetables for everyday use. Sheriff Samuel M. Hay and his family lived there, and local accounts recalled fiddlers playing on the front porch many Saturday evenings. Criminal offenses that brought prisoners there in 1922-1936 commonly included illegal liquor activity, pointing a pistol at another person, abusive language, wife beating, and stealing chickens. In 1924 Georgia ended the practice of execution by hanging in the county of conviction and required electrocution at the Georgia State Prison in Milledgeville instead. The jail later held civil rights protesters known as the Newton 6 in 1970 after student-led marches over school integration grew into a three-month economic boycott; Sheriff Henry Odum arrested many protesters, and Forrest Sawyer, Jr., Robert Johnson, Joe Lightfoot, Leon Walker, Tyrone Brooks, and Lloyd Jackson were jailed without bond for 45 days until a federal writ of habeus corpus ordered their release. As Newton County grew, the 1901 jail, built for a county of nearly 17,000 people and able to hold about 40 prisoners, was replaced by a larger jail in 1985 and then by another completed in 2003 for $27.5 million, with capacity for 600 prisoners, as the county population approached 100,000 by 2010.