Jailers Find Stress to be Inescapable
At top, Kingsport Times-News reporter Allison Mechem tours the women’s cell block of the Sullivan County Jail with officer Jean Hilton during a recent observation of the facility in Blountville. Deputy Steve Hinkle, bottom, fingerprints Mechem to display part of the “booking-in” process inmates go through at the jail. Mechem found stress is an almost constant factor for the jail officers.
The Sullivan County jail — built to be a county jail but used more like a state prison — and its funding and structural problems have been at the center of controversy since construction began on it five years ago.
But discussion of jail cracks and the politics of housing state prisoners in a county jail goes on mostly outside the jail complex. Inside, the corrections officers of the Sullivan County Sheriff’s Department are more concerned with the 300 people, on average, they watch over each day.
On the Friday Night I spent with jail officers, the conversation was of the people coming into jail and already there, where to put them, and what their needs are.
“Corrections is stressful. Just when you think you’ve seen it all, something else happens to top it,” said Lt. Jack Shepherd. Shepherd and Lt. Jerry Pratt oversee jail administration and operations.
Jail officers Shannon Castle and Hal Brown said they don’t mind corrections work, but admitted jail duty is, in most cases, tolerated as a first step toward getting assigned to patrol duty. But officer Jean Hilton, who tends the female inmates, said corrections is a job she loves.
“I really, really do,’” she said. “I care about them, and I’ve never had a problem with any of these (inmates in the women’s cell the night the Times-News visited).
“It’s all in the way you treat them. They’re prisoners, but I didn’t put them here. I just treat them like people.”
The Friday evening shift I observed began and ended like all others, with a head count.
There were 261 inmates in the main jail and at the jail annex, a facility used to house misdemeanor offenders. The annex was built while the county still used the old jail and was scheduled to be shut down when the new jail opened. When the new jail reached capacity within months of opening in 1987, the annex gradually filled and has remained open.
But more interesting to the 2-10 p.m. shift was a list of 15 people who were to arrive at the jail during the evening. Some would be serving 48-hour sentences for DUI, or would be serving part of jail sentences that were set up so as not to conflict with work schedules.
Would they all show up? Would they all show up at once, like several did the week before, resulting in hours and hours of book-ins?
It didn’t end up that way — by shift’s end, all had been accounted for, and three more were brought in from the jail in Bristol. They came in a steady stream, enough to keep everyone busy without the usual Friday night pandemonium.
“This is the quietest it’s been around here on a Friday that I can remember. It’s very unusual,” said Castle, senior man on Sgt. Jasper Baker’s shift for the past year.
The inmates booked into the jail on this Friday night were mostly DUI offenders coming in to serve their mandatory 48 hours. This scenario sometimes leads to another set of problems.
“If they know they’re coming in, some of them will get drunk before they get here,” Brown said. In most cases the person is not too intoxicated to answer questions about his personal, criminal and medical history, but sometimes an impaired inmate-to-be is given time to sleep it off in a holding cell.
One DUI offender turned himself in for the weekend, and after questioning him Castle and Brown agreed he appeared to be slightly inebriated. But he understood and responded to the questions they asked him, so he was booked in.
The frequency of rounds is a security matter, so the number of times I accompanied Baker and Hilton to the cell areas won’t be included in this article. Guards make physical inspections of the cells and bays throughout their shifts, and video screens at each guard station give constant pictures of the cells and passageways.
After 5 p.m. is dinnertime at the jail, so Hilton and I went to the women’s block to see how the meal was progressing. The women lined up for tray dinners and coffee.
“The food here is good,” Hilton said, although the jail’s staff members usually bring their meals in from nearby fast-food restaurants. Fish, vegetables, bread and fried apples were on the jail menu this night, and when one inmate got an extra carton of milk with her meal, Hilton asked why.
“I’m pregnant, and happily so,” the woman replied. She said she expects to get out of jail well before her expected due date.
After dinner, from 6-10 p.m., women and trusties have visitation. They are allowed an hour with visitors of their choice.
During that time, Brown, Hilton and Castle complete paperwork on the bookings they’ve already done, and book in a DUI suspect arrested near Bristol. Chris Glass, 29, of Bluff City, at first declines to take a breathalyzer test, but changes his mind later
Though none of the inmates checking in this night are uncooperative, Brown said some who are brought in are downright abusive toward jailers.
“How do we keep from going off on them? Well, after a while it’s funny. Some of the things they say or do are just funny,’’ he said.
But there are those whose violent tendencies toward themselves or others demand constant attention.
“We’ve gotten a new monitoring system that was seized by vice officers from a gambling establishment,” Shepherd said. The new camera stays fixed on cells holding inmates believed to be suicide risks, while the jail-wide monitoring system continually flashes pictures of cellblocks and bays onto television screens in guard stations.
Camera systems are a must, Shepherd said, when a handful of guards must monitor two trusty bays, six 16-persons cells, two eight-person cells, and one cellblock — Kilo — that contains nine one-man cells and is used to house violent offenders or those who might be harmed by others or themselves.
