Viewing the virtual class trip to the Orient Road Jail gave me more insight of what a jail really looks like on the inside. Our tour-guide and jail shift commander, Lt. Scott Smith, was able to explain the operation of their jail facility and possibly cleared up my image of what a jail looks like in real-life verses television.
The jail didn’t have the standard bars and stone walls like I had seen in the classic prison movie, “Shawshank Redemption”. There wasn’t much obscenity or overly aggressive inmates harassing others through their cell doors; not even a poster of the famous Rita Hayworth to disguise their plot of escape.
Orient Road Jail is a 6,036sqft facility, with three main units- North, South, and Central. The first two units are where the inmates [all 999 of them] are housed. The Central Unit is the main unit that suspects see when entering into the jailhouse. There, suspects go through the “booking process”, which roughly takes four to six hours. Lt. Smith stated that there is a trick to this; if the person is booked before midnight, he/she may make the docket and can go to appearance court the next morning. However, if they are not booked or bond out before the given time, they must wait 24 hours before they can see a judge.
When looking at the booking process and the pods, especially the psych unit, I was remorseful towards those who may have gone there for little misdemeanors. This place was real. I was not physically there, but I could tell that this was not a place that I would want to be in for 364 days or more. Not even if the jail did offer cooked meals, free PBS specials on TV, or a chance to sleep my life away 22 hours a day.
Everything is so modernized too. The cell’s bar-doors were replaced with wooden doors. They have the appearance court done by video and soon, Lt. Smith stated, the visitations will be conducted by video as well. Inmates would be allowed to see their visitors through video from Faulkenburg Road Jail to their jailhouse. Lt. Smith said that this would lower the traffic of people and it just may help monitor the meetings better by keeping a close eye through the technology of video.
The jail seemed like it is ran smoothly. If I could choose what jail I wanted to be sent to, I may want to choose Orient Road Jail because it’s clean, it’s quiet, and their motto is geared towards the feelings of the inmates where they treat them as humane as possible
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