Completed shortly after the breakup of the firm of Peters and Haynes, the jail was Haynes’s first Art Deco design and his largest project until after the Great Depression. The ground story of the original three-story building (Haynes later added two floors to the building) is of smooth limestone, above which two stories feature fifteen wide, fluted pilasters in buff brick alternating with stacks of steel-framed windows interspersed with gray lead spandrels. A narrow cast-stone frieze links the tops of the pilasters with zigzag motifs and starburst patterns.
This compositional pattern of alternating vertical channels of windows and masonry piers also prevailed in the design of the twelve-story former Lubbock National Bank (1940, 1952, John B. Roberts, now the Lubbock County Office Building) at 916 Main, which, with the demolished twelve-story Hilton Hotel (1930, Anton F. Korn Jr.), spatially framed the northwest corner of the original two-block courthouse square.