Criteria changed on Saturday for people who want to visit inmates at the Lyon County Jail.
The new system is intended to eliminate visits by people who are not supposed to be in contact with prisoners — victims, witnesses, Drug Court participants, people out of jail on bond and others that the judicial system already has ordered to stay away from offenders.
It also limits to five the number of adults who can visit an inmate within any given month. Minor children are not included on the visitor list but may visit.
The inmate gets to choose whom he or she wants to see, as long as no one on the list is someone barred from contact. Entries must be printed, not written in longhand, to be valid, and a new list can be submitted each month for inmates sentenced to longer terms.
“It’s been a problem that we’ve recognized for a long time,” said Capt. Brian Anstey, jail administrator. “The Department of Corrections has been doing this for years, but we never could figure out a way to track and follow the logistics of who can’t have contact with who.”
Two jail officers on the 4 p.m. to midnight shift created tracking documents that include the inmate’s list of names, visitation times for an entire month, a place for notes, including names of banned individuals. The one-page information for each inmate can be used for one month, rather than weekly, as has been the case, and any jailer easily can check for restricted visitors and visit times.
“Everything they need is right there for them,” Anstey said of the new sheets.
The names of banned visitors are available to the jail through court records, such as subpoena or witness lists, complaints and affidavits.
“It’s a little rough around the edges to start out, but I think we can hone it and make it work,” Anstey said.
Visitors need to present identification to jail officers before they are allowed in any of the five visitation booths.
“We do require a photo ID,” Anstey said. “It can be a college ID, it can be a high school ID, as long as it’s a form of identification that has a picture that hasn’t been altered.”
The need to exclude certain categories of visitors has been obvious, he said, and the reasons for that are many.
Victims and witnesses can be intimidated or coaxed into changing their stories; some friends are negative influences on inmates, and co-defendants present another potential problem that wouldn’t be apparent until court hearings.
“There’s also the concern that they’re working on their stories,” Anstey said.
Inmates generally are allowed 75 minutes of visiting each week, based on their locations, or pods, within the jail. Inmate Group A, for example, can have visitors from 9 to 11 a.m. on Mondays, 1 to 3 p.m. on Wednesdays, and 7 to 9 p.m. on Saturday.
“Unless they had a disciplinary sanction, they are eligible for visitation,” he said.
Anstey said management has made an effort to offer a range of times to accommodate visitors’ schedules. Eliminating drop-in visitors who are not on the list also is expected to be helpful.
“I really think that this is going to be a benefit to the inmates as well, because they have to budget the 75 minutes a week they have,” Anstey said. “That’s really difficult to do if they don’t know who is going to come visit them.
“If they have a friend that just pops in, they end up using 15 minutes of visitation that they may have wanted to spend on their dad or wife or whoever.”
Inmates can earn extra visiting time through several means, and receive visitation certificates for their efforts.
“We use those for inmates that go out of their way to clean up, they show exemplary behavior .... and all of the officers either carry those in their pockets or keep a list of the inmates that earn them,” Anstey said.
The jail’s maximum capacity is 168, with an overall average of 110 inmates from Lyon County.
“For the month of July, we averaged 150, and about 40 of those are from out-of-county,” Anstey said.
To provide opportunities for visits, the jail has a routine schedule of 9 to 11 a.m., 1 to 3 p.m. and 7 to 9 p.m. daily, except Fridays, when no visitations can be made.
“The actual schedule, the rotation, will not change,” Anstey said of the new five-visitor system.