By BOB ANDERSON
The Advocate
LIVINGSTON — Surrounded by security personnel, 216 prisoners were transferred Saturday into the new Livingston Parish jail.
Sheriff’s deputies transported inmates wearing leg chains and orange jumpsuits eight-at-a-time to group holding cells. Through thick windows, men with unsmiling faces watched from the cells, awaiting their turns to receive sacks of necessary items, get new identification bands placed around their wrists and get escorted to a bunk in one of three different security levels.
The operation, which began about 6 a.m. and lasted until early afternoon, went without a hitch, Warden Jim Brown said.
Brown’s next logistics problem is getting more than 200 Livingston Parish prisoners back from jails in other parishes, where they have been housed because the old jail in Livingston Parish couldn’t hold them all.
The high cost of keeping those prisoners in out-of-parish facilities and the difficulties of getting them back to Livingston Parish to make court appearances, were among the things that pushed local officials to build the new jail.
Parish voters made that possible by reallocating 25 percent of a 1 percent sales tax to building and maintaining the jail. The other 75 percent of that tax continues to go toward improving parish roads.
Saturday morning’s operation began in the old jail with the removal of laundry, decontamination of inmates, and a “shakedown” of prisoners for contraband, Brown said.
Little forbidden fruit was found as deputies also searched each prisoner’s single box of personal items.
Members of the Sheriff’s Special Response Team held strategic positions around the two adjacent jails as all three shifts of jailers manned the two facilities and moved prisoners, Chief Deputy Jason Ard said.
The new jail will be much more secure than the old one, said Perry Rushing, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.
The design is far better, the systems work properly and visitation will be done by video camera, Brown said.
Other cameras monitor and record activities in the dormitories, and a secure sally port will help to reduce the chances of an inmate escaping when being taken into the jail or out to go to court, the warden said.
Another important security factor is that prisoners can be divided into minimum, medium and maximum security groups, Brown said.
That will provide more protection for minimal security prisoners, Brown said.
Female inmates are housed in a separate wing from males and also will be segregated into minimum, medium and maximum security groups, Sheriff Willie Graves said.
The female wing has 115 cells, he said.
Overall, the 84,000-square-foot facility has 10 dormitories with a total of 670 beds. It was designed so that it can be expanded, Graves said.
Copyright 2009 Capital City Press