The Emporia Gazette

May 27, 2012

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It takes a village to run a jail.

With an inmate count that often hovers around 140 and runs as high as 180 on rare occasions, the Lyon County Jail’s population at any given time can be larger than those in several surrounding towns. The people, coupled with the services the jail must provide, make it a city within the city of Emporia.

“One thing that struck me was how quite small this building looks on the outside,” said Capt. Brian Anstey, jail administrator. “It’s a small city. It really is. Basically everything that takes place in a small city is taking place right here.”

Within this city are the detention officers, cooks, a nurse, dispatchers, process servers, sheriff’s officers, local inmates, out-of-county inmates and other players that make the jail function. Many others — such as ministers, counselors, visitors, interpreters, observers, and attorneys— are not there every day, but come and go as needed. Church services, in English and Spanish, are held on Saturdays and Sundays and 12-step meetings are held by Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous. Inmates can study for GEDs, exercise in the gymnasium and check out books from the small jail library.

The detention officers and dispatchers ensure that those comings and goings are monitors and supervised, just as they watch over the prisoners on work release, prisoners who may be sick or suicidal, those who are being booked into jail or released, and those who are fulfilling sentences from the courts. They make sure that the work-release inmates are awakened in time to get to their jobs and they strip search each one as they return from work; they take urine samples for the courts; they transport prisoners from the jail to court appearances in Emporia or Topeka or other cities or to prisons to serve sentences. They use industrial-sized washers and dryers to clean hundreds of pounds of dirty jumpsuits each week and a smaller washer and dryer to separately clean inmates’ undergarments and personal clothing. The jailers also are responsible for background checks on people who work with or mentor children in this area, bankers, teachers and others, including people who apply for concealed-carry handgun permits.

But most Emporians are not aware of the busy little city.

“This whole side of life could not exist, as far as you know. Then you go to work here,” Anstey said.

Anstey has worked at the jail for almost 19 years, and has seen the changes brought on by decisions made in courtrooms, commission meetings and in the culture of the area.

“One of the areas we’re seeing the biggest population increase is female offenders,” Anstey said. “Meth is taking its toll.”

Many of the changes have made the work more orderly and safer for the workers. Remodeling at the jail put several booking processes within the same area, rather than scattered around the building. The consolidation eliminated the need to move prisoners from place to place before they could be booked into the jail.

A sally port adjacent to the alley links to an underground tunnel so prisoners can be moved safely by one officer, whether they are being brought in to be booked or are being taken to the Lyon County Courthouse for a hearing. The tunnel has, in addition to cameras, keyed elevators at each end to restrict access; it also eliminates the old above-ground transfers to the courthouse, when prisoners could escape custody.

On Thursday morning, detention officers needed to move two prisoners to a federal hearing in Topeka. Because of the nature of their crimes, the metal-lined transport van was accompanied by officers from the Emporia Police Department.

The jail now also takes paying, out-of-county prisoners to fill empty beds, and that adds hundreds of thousands of dollars to county coffers.

On Thursday afternoon, Johnson County officers brought down nine new prisoners to be booked in, fingerprinted and processed, which can include swabbing inmates’ mouths for DNA samples. Pertinent information goes into a computer system that allows cross-matching of records from other areas. Soon after, three or four others were sent to the jail by court order. All of them needed to be patted down and processed into the facility, and all of them needed to be watched carefully, just as detention officers watch the inmates already serving time.

“Any time you have two or more people in a room together, they’re going to find something to disagree over,” Anstey said.

Tempers occasionally flare into fights or property damage. Anstey said that one inmate managed to pull a bed from a wall and destroy the opposite filled-concrete block wall in C Pod, where prisoners are put who are deemed dangerous to themselves or to others.

“He made it into a two-room suite,” Anstey said.

Others have managed to rip off the 360-pound cell doors. Some have blocked the doors with towels before forcing toilets to overflow. Once enough water accumulated in the cell, the inmates pull away the towels and the door sweep, releasing a flood of water into the open area of the pod.

Others content themselves with making weapons, ranging from rolled-up magazines in a sock to mundane objects like pens and razors, sharpened into deadlier weapons.

“In a normal life, you don’t have to worry about somebody turning a toothbrush into a weapon,” Anstey said. “... We’re dealing with people every day that no one else wants to handle. I don’t know a delicate way to put that. Most are not bad people, they just made some bad decisions.”

The stress of the job, combined with the health and safety risks, put detention officer’s life span expectations well below the national average.

“(They) have a life span of 53, compared to the general population, which is 73,” Anstey said. “It’s not just a routine, run-of-the-mill job. They have to have increased communications skills. They have to be able to think on their feet.”

And Anstey considers mature employees as assets.

“We rely on the wisdom of older people here at the jail. The wisdom is invaluable,” he said.