Last week, Ledger-News Assistant Managing Editor Erika Neldner and I went to jail.
Not to worry, we weren’t the victims of a rogue elected official or some angry reader who felt we had defamed them.
We went willing and voluntarily … and with the assumption that Lt. Jay Baker and Major Karen Johnson, who escorted us around the facility, would let us leave just as voluntarily.
The idea to tour the Cherokee County Adult Detention Center originated after the county commission OK’ed a 2010 contract renewal for the company that provides food service at the astounding, to me, anyway, cost of 84 cents per meal.
I cornered Johnson, the supervisor of the jail, which is located on Chattin Drive, just off Univeter Road, on her way out of the work session and asked her if I could come eat at the jail some time.
Without batting an eye, she said, “Sure, do you want to eat with the staff or the inmates?”
When I told her I wanted to come on “steak night,” Johnson told me there was no steak night, but she explained that the menus were different for staff and inmates.
Not long afterward, I asked Erika, who has been covering public safety in Cherokee County since before I got here, if she wanted to see if we could get a tour.
She made a phone call to Baker, the media’s primary point of contact for the sheriff’s department, and, within a few minutes, we had an appointment for the following week.
Erika had never been to jail and was a little leery at what we might encounter. Being slightly demented, I started recounting various scenes from movies such as “Silence of the Lambs” and “Caged Heat.”
I also explained to her about the jail smell, a truly distinct odor that I had encountered while doing articles that had taken me inside the Floyd County jail, the Henry County jail and the Atlanta Detention Center.
Sadly, our visit to the Cherokee jail was devoid of any cannibalistic lunatics, a la “Silence,” felonious supermodels, a la “Heat,” or even the jail smell.
In fact, about the only similarity our local detention facility has with the movies is that the main corridor on the lower level is called “the mile,” which might make one think of the movie “The Green Mile” but minus death row, a gentle giant of an inmate with supernatural abilities or Tom Hanks’ as a stern-but-kind-hearted death row supervisor.
That isn’t to say the tour wasn’t interesting, and, in fact, it was quite helpful and educational for me and Erika. (See her article about the tour on Page 23.)
Among the things that struck me most about our jail was its cleanliness, its well-thought security and modularity and its lack of chaos to the point of being almost peaceful.
No matter where we went, and we went pretty much everywhere, the facility was remarkably tidy and neat, even though Johnson was apologetic about it being laundry day and some of the holding cells in different areas had piles of clothes and linen on the floor in front of the doors.
Just as orderly as the jail’s appearance was its layout. On one hand, the entire operation, from the minute some lawbreaker rolls through high, double gates covered in concertina barbed wire and into the intake area, the aura is one of authority and control.
Just as important as letting those who end up there know who is in charge, is the considerations made for bringing in visitors and other people who have business in the jail. For example, inmates don’t have to leave their cell pods to be taken to a visitor area, and can see their families by going up some stairs without ever having to leave the area where they are being held.
During our entire tour, there also was no yelling or shouting, nobody moving in a hurry, no sudden or frantic activity anywhere and nobody looked like they might be out of place or somewhere they maybe shouldn’t be.
I am not naïve enough to think that the jail is such a model of efficiency 24/7 and that we might see a little different scenario if we spent any significant amount of time there and weren’t being escorted around by a lieutenant and a major with the sheriff’s department. But, I also saw enough to know that Johnson and her staff have the place nailed shut and anybody going in isn’t coming out until they’re supposed to come out.
After the jail tour, and because were at the nexus of the county’s public safety infrastructure, Baker took us up to talk to Chris Colett, who has turned the county’s formerly semi-dysfunctional 911 center into a model operation that has been recognized as one of the best in the state.
We also stopped in on Robby Westbrook’s Emergency Operations Center, where 30 county employees were going through work readiness training and 30 more were scheduled to get the same training.
The whole excursion made me realize how lucky we are in Cherokee County when it comes to our public safety.
Most of us are already well aware of the stellar job our law enforcement officers and our firefighters do. Their efforts can be found on the pages of this newspaper every week.
But most people also aren’t aware of the anonymous, behind-the-scenes efforts supporting the men and women we see all the time in police cars and fire trucks, like the 911 dispatchers who get them to our homes or the EOC people who help them mitigate floods and ice storms and get where they need to be or the people who keep the criminals they apprehend under lock and key.
It’s a relief to know that when we go to sleep, there is an entire group of people who are wide awake … watching our backs.
For that, we owe them our thanks.
