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The County Commissioners, other county officials, citizens, and members of the Guthrie press were on hand last Tuesday morning to conduct the inspection of the Logan County Jail.
Sheriff Damon Devereaux and Captain Randy Lester conducted the tour of the county’s detention and training facilities, primarily for County Commissioners Monty Piearcy and Mark Sharpton. Annual county jail inspections by County Commissioners are required by state law, but Sheriff Devereaux encourages members of the public to attend also.
Sheriff Devereaux and Captain Lester took the group through the booking and initial reception area, meeting and learning room, inmate pods, monitoring tower space, kitchen, and laundry, showing both the key features and improvements of the facility. Devereaux even demonstrated the jail’s body scanner, used to search incoming inmates in place of body cavity searches, on a local press member who was part of the inspection group.
Sheriff Devereaux emphasized some key recent upgrades. For example, the county has managed to do well in maintaining highquality tools and technology for monitoring the inmate population and providing rehabilitation opportunities for them. Lester talked about the jail’s inbound mail scanning system added in the last couple of years, accessible to the inmates via the jail’s learning tablets and kiosks in various controlled areas. The Sheriff ’s Office installed this system to keep paper out of the inmates’ hands; it was discovered a few years ago that the paper in the letters that many inmates received were laced with heroin, and the scanning system permits the inmates to get their mail but also keep the prisoners and staff safe. The tablets and kiosks already provide critical learning opportunities for the inmates as part of a points system required for their rehabilitation, and this simplified integrating the mail scanning feature.
However, Sheriff Devereaux brought up some key replacement needs for the jail, just due to ongoing wear and tear. He talked about the flooring for the reception station in the main booking area, as well as some refurbishment of some of the inmate pod doors. Another big challenge will be replacing the carpet in the monitoring tower, which is the original carpet installed when the jail was first built. “Those systems literally cannot go down, so we’ll have to move everything around to get that done,” Devereaux said.
Both Devereaux and Lester brought up some continuing challenges just from the inmate population and the situation of the jail as part of the state’s criminal justice system. Tour attendees witnessed several loud outbursts from a new inmate that had just arrived before the inspection, and Capt. Lester was quick to explain. “He’s got a severe mental health issue,” he said. “We’ve had a big jump in the amount of mental health cases we’re handling, especially since the legalization of medical marijuana.” When questioned about the numbers of mental health cases the jail is handling, he elaborated, “Currently, one of every seven new inmates has a mental health issue; that number used to be about one in ten. We also have one in about every twenty that is an extreme mental health case. In fact, on any given day, at least 10 of our inmates are only here because they’re waiting for a bed to become available at Vinita.”
Both Sheriff Devereaux and Capt. Lester discussed the county’s current inmates. Logan County had 179 inmates on the day of the inspection, of which 63 were Federal inmates taken under the County’s contract with the US Marshals Service. The remaining population are state and county inmates.
Logan County also contracts to take inmates from Canadian County and the Town of Crescent, as well as the local inmates. It’s a tough trade-off, as it brings in funds for the County to maintain the jail but it also means more deputies are needed for staffing. “Our inmate numbers are up, but our headcount is down, because just like everyone has seen after COVID, it’s tough to find people who want to work,” Devereaux said.
Along this line, noticeable throughout the tour was how the Jail’s administration gets the work done via the inmate population; indeed, inmates do most of the cooking, laundry, and cleaning chores, and there were very few places the tour went that did not have an inmate either there or coming through on some work assignment.
At the conclusion of the tour, Commissioner Piearcy summed up the group’s feelings. The jail “is starting to show its age a little bit, but overall it looks really good.” Addressing Sheriff Devereaux: “You’ve done a good job keeping it up. It was a heck of an investment and we’ve goot to keep it up.”
The jail was built in 2007 at a cost of $8.27 million, and is certified to house 198 inmates.