By JENNY MICHAEL
Bismarck Tribune
Prison-kitchen plan cooked up in Utah
Jail expansion dead until next year in Md. county
BURLEIGH COUNTY, N.D. — A $750,000 renovation project under way at the Burleigh County Detention Center includes changing the way inmates will visit with outsiders.
The renovations at the jail include updating equipment in the control room, putting down new carpet, painting and adding eight new bunks. The project also includes an overhaul of the system by which people can visit inmates in the jail.
Currently, visitation at the detention center lasts from 1 to 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Four inmates can have visitors at a time, with each visit lasting 20 minutes. Inmates are brought to the main floor of the courthouse from the detention center upstairs and are separated from their visitors by a thick pane of glass. Conversations take place via telephones. The setup looks much like something taken out of television and movies.
Under the new system, inmates will remain on the floor on which they are housed during visitation, while visitors will be in visitations booths on the first floor. Inmates and visitors will be able to see each other over monitors, and they still will converse over telephones. Eight inmates will be able to have visitation at one time.
The existing four rooms used for public visitation will be demolished on Wednesday to make room for the eight new visitation booths, Captain Lisa Wicks said. Each booth will have a monitor and telephone to connect the visitors to the inmates upstairs.
The changes will allow for more efficient visitation periods, Lt. Nick Sevart said. Jail staff spend much of Tuesday and Thursday afternoons transporting inmates downstairs and back up for visits, while office staff must coordinate the visitors.
“It does take up a lot of time,” he said.
The new system eventually will allow for more diverse visitation schedules, Wicks said. As it is now, people unable to get to the detention center between 1 and 4 p.m. on Tuesdays and Thursdays cannot visit their loved ones in the jail.
“If they work the afternoon shift ... they can never find time” to visit, she said.
New or expanded visitation schedules will be figured out after staff get the hang of the new system, she said.
The changes to the visitation areas will cost about $150,000, Wicks said. That amount includes demolition and renovation of the former visitation rooms, equipment and construction of new visitation booths. Two rooms reserved for inmate visits with attorneys and clergy will remain unchanged.
Though the booths will not be in separate rooms, visitors and inmates still will have privacy from others, Wicks said. She said the angle of the monitors makes them impossible to see from anything but straight on, and the telephones will ensure private conversations.
People waiting to visit inmates at the jail on Thursday were not enthusiastic about the changes. The loss of contact will be hard on inmates who already get very little time outside their cells, they said.
Cassie Scherr’s boyfriend has been in the detention center for 2½ months and expects to be in for seven more. She said most of his contact with the outside world consists of letters and telephone calls, which she said were expensive. The biweekly personal visits are all he has to look forward to. Looking at visitors over a monitor instead of in person won’t be the same, Scherr said.
“That’s going to hurt him,” she said.
Scherr once spent five days herself in the detention center. Meals are brought to cells and recreation time is limited, she said. The time when inmates get taken to visitation may not seem like much but it is important to the inmates, she said.
Scherr also believes the amount of money spent to revamp the visitation system could better be used in more programs for inmates and better meals. Another woman, who did not wish to give her name, said a visiting room, such as what the state penitentiary offers, would be a better way of offering visitation. At the prison, prisoners receive visitors in a large, open room with benches and chairs, and they can have some physical contact with visitors.
Scherr said the opportunities for more visitors coming in seemed the only advantage the new visitation system would have over the old.
“They really weren’t thinking of anyone” when deciding to change visitation, she said.
Wicks defended the changes, saying such visitation systems are used in Cass County and Grand Forks County.
“It’s the new way” jails are going, she said.
Visiting rooms such as the one at the state penitentiary aren’t seen as necessities in jails, since most of the people in jails are there for short periods of time, Wicks said. She said prisons have such rooms, where physical contact is allowed, since prison inmates may be there for many years.
“The majority of our population is short stay,” she said.
Visitation will not be at normal times during the project. Visitation will be from 1 to 4 p.m. today, Tuesday and Oct. 17. There will be no visitation on Thursday or Oct. 14. Regular visitation hours will resume on Oct. 21.
The other $600,000 of the project will be spent on updating the jail, which was built in 1992, Wicks said. The control room will get complete updates, since the technology in it had not been updated since the jail was built, “which at that time was the most advanced,” Wicks said. The technology has become so outdated that new parts could not be found for it.
The new control room will feature the latest in technology, including touch screens, she said.
Other parts of the jail facelift include adding eight beds, painting and carpeting. The new beds will take the jail from 130-inmate capacity to 138.
“That eight will make a difference,” Wicks said.
The jail hasn’t had new carpet and flooring since it was built, and it was last painted after the detention center became nonsmoking in 1997, Wicks said. She said the renovations will take time.
“Every time you do work, you have to move the inmates,” she said.
Though the sheriff’s department will be “loud and dirty” during demolition on Wednesday, Wicks doesn’t think the remodeling will take too long to complete.
“Hopefully, by the end of the year, everything will be done,” she said.
Copyright 2008 The Bismarck Tribune, a division of Lee Enterprises