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Michael Dunne: I'm Michael Dunne. The Big House, the Clink, the Slammer, we have so many words for jail. And whether you're 6 years old or 96, you know what jail is, and you have an idea what it's like. Do you? I thought I knew all about jail, but what I really knew was from TV and movies. And having just completed a tour of the Lane County Jail, I can say that some of my preconceived notions were right, some were way off. Today on the show, I'm going to take you on a bit of a verbal tour of our local jail and also provide you with an interview with the captain who oversees it all.
Jail's a scary place, a place where every possible problem and ill of our community crashes together. Yet it's also a workplace where men and women try to establish order and also establish a level of humanity.
Those sounds were the heavy rolling of a jail slider and the closing and locking of a cell door. Yesterday I had the opportunity to tour a facility where no one actually wants to go: the Lane County Jail, located near the railroad tracks off Fifth Street in downtown Eugene.
The dull brick and concrete building looks very institutional and very utilitarian. I was provided a tour by the institution's leader, Captain Greg Rice, someone who's worked at the facility for 25 years. In fact, when he started my tour, he told me that when he was first hired by the sheriff's department, he thought about becoming a patrolman, but instead fell in love with working and operating a jail.
Hard to believe that someone would want to be in a place so many others desperately want to leave, but in many ways the Lane County Jail offers some strange contradictions. Now, I was able to join Captain Rice throughout every section of the jail, but adhering to policy, I wasn't allowed to record or take photos. I wasn't even allowed to bring my phone. So right now, I'm going to paint you a verbal picture of the Lane County Jail and what it's like on the inside.
First, those strange contradictions. The building is quite old, built in the 1970s, with later sections added on in the 1990s. It looks and feels like what it is: a very dated government building showcasing its age. Yet over the intervening years, and out of necessity, a lot of technology has been shoehorned into the facility: video conferencing screens, a medical facility with the latest gear, and a full arraignment court built right inside.
Next, it's a huge facility occupying almost two city blocks, but it also feels extremely claustrophobic. Of course, as you walk around the facility, you can't help but think: Could I actually make it in a place like this? What would the tiny cells and the lack of light do to me?
From the initial bay, where deputies and police officers drive through huge steel doors to deposit prisoners, everything about intake involves movement from one process to another. First, there's a small room where someone might be forced to take a breathalyzer test. Next, they are patted down and searched for anything dangerous, like drugs and weapons. Yes, prisoners are searched in the field, but when you're housing hundreds and hundreds of people, caution is the first and last word.
Intake actually involves a lot of precautions, and not just for the staff. The prisoners are screened for mental health issues, medical issues and a host of other conditions. In no small way, every single issue our community deals with on the streets is amplified tenfold in jail.
During intake, so much of the process is about determining if someone can be released safely back outside, or if they need to be incarcerated. Yes, guards make up the bulk of the staff, but a jail is home to numerous administrative functions that all seek to determine who someone is, what they did, where they're from and what's the best trajectory for them after arrest.
Of course, a fingerprinting and mugshot station are prominent. Even though housed in such an old building, the technology of fingerprint identification moves at the speed of the internet. If a person is wanted for other infractions, a state and national database can often match the fingerprints to a crime in a matter of minutes.
If someone is going to be detained or housed at the jail, it's going to be in one of three types of facility. Those who are deemed the least risk are housed in what looks like a big dorm: bunk beds next to each other, tables, chairs and a flat-screen TV. I saw dozens of inmates, mostly white men in their 20s and 30s, milling about watching daytime sports television.
The next level is the cells, and even here there are two types. One type of celled prisoner has access to showers and a hallway to walk around with supervision. Another type of cell is very isolated and meant for those who are dangerous or those on suicide watch. Yes, I got to step inside one that was unoccupied, and yes, it was as tiny and terrifying as you could imagine.
Inmates who might have suicidal ideation or real mental health challenges are the biggest part of the overall jail population. In many ways, jail is the default option for so many people who have addictions, cognitive and social disorders and the like. Again, with the contradiction in terms, we think of jail as a place for criminals, and it is. But it's also the last place, where there is no other place, for people who might not fit into the neat definition of what a criminal is.
During the tour, I was surprised to learn a few things about jail that I never knew. First, there is no one phone call. In fact, in one of the holding rooms, there's a phone on the wall, and prisoners can use it whenever they want to call attorneys or family. Second, prisoners who earn the right get access to tablets where they can watch movies, take classes and even make monitored phone calls. Third, the meals and meal planning in jail are nothing like the movies. They have a dietitian on staff to develop the meals, and I learned that if I ate the number of calories they offer in jail, I'd gain weight. They can also accommodate vegetarians, vegans and religious requirements.
As we completed the tour, I thought about the word labyrinth. The definition of labyrinth is a complicated, irregular network of passages or paths in which it's difficult to find one's way. The Lane County Jail fits that definition to a T: a lot of passages and paths, and a lot of people, through their own fault and through the fault of circumstances, who've lost their way. You'll hear from Captain Rice about what it's like to work in the jail and how they try to manage a population that's a melting pot of violent, scared and mentally ill people.
Captain Greg Rice, really appreciate you taking me on this tour and sitting down with me.
Greg Rice: Thank you.
Dunne: Boy, I'd love to start with just sort of the statistics. So how many inmates do you normally have, or at this time, about how many inmates do you house?
Rice: Well, our facility is a 411-bed facility, and our capacity is set at 382. The reason for the difference is we act under a federal consent decree that makes it so we don't have overcrowding issues. So, 382.
Dunne: Okay. And then how many staff do you have?
Rice: So in corrections, we have 136 deputies and 34 support staff. That would be like records officers, facility security officers and maintenance staff.
Dunne: How do you segregate inmates in terms of what are the criteria? Okay, this person needs to go here versus this person might need to go here.
Rice: So we group adults in custody by classification, and classification is determined by a couple of different factors. It could be their current behavior, it could be based on their current charges. We also look at their past behavior and past charges as well, and so we group them into what we call risk categories.
Dunne: What's the average stay or median length of time to stay here at Lane County Jail?
Rice: Yeah, our average length of stay is roughly around 22 days, but the median length of stay is four days, which I think is a more accurate representation of what we see here. The reason for that is we have individuals who could be waiting for trial, for example, on a murder charge, and they could be with us for a year and a half. But then we could also have individuals who are only in our custody for a day or two. So the four days is more realistic of what we're seeing.
Dunne: Take us through the process. Someone is arrested and they're brought here. What happens?
Rice: Sure. So the arresting officer will do some paperwork that provides us the information so we can lodge them. Once that's done, deputies can take the person into the facility. The deputy then takes control of the new custody, and they do a pat-down, looking for anything that was missed out in the field, like drugs or weapons, anything that could cause any type of safety concern. While that's happening, our records staff is taking the paperwork the arresting officer brought in and lodging them into our system, making sure everything's appropriate on the paperwork.
Every person, when they're brought into custody, is seen by a nurse. We have a nurse in booking 24/7, and the nurse screens them to make sure there's nothing medically emergent in the moment that needs to be dealt with. We're also screening for any type of mental health issues, and we're trying to figure out what medications they might be on. Our nurse is asking them where they get their medication filled, at a pharmacy, who's their doctor, so we can get a release of information signed so we can have continuity of care for them, because that's huge for us. We're also doing suicide screening at the same time. The huge goal is making sure that when individuals are in our care, they are protected and we maintain their health and well-being as best as we can while they're in our care.
Dunne: Okay, and then once that intake is done, what happens next? Talk about the fingerprinting, the mugshot, and I know there's sort of, and this is probably too simplistic, but there are kind of two types: those who might be released immediately and those who have to be housed. Talk about that.
Rice: Sure. So after that initial screening is done, we have some holding rooms in our booking area where individuals can watch TV, use the phone, and they wait to go through the remainder of the process. Part of that process is we have state employees who work inside our building, pretrial services. They work for the courts, and they have the ability to make release decisions on the spot. So everybody gets interviewed by them, and they make a decision on whether they can release them or not. If they decide they want to release them and put them on conditions of release, they do the paperwork, give it to our records staff, who work them up for release, and then the deputy takes care of the individual, gets them their shoes back and their property that was taken off of them, and releases them back out to the public. But if they have to stay, then we go through a housing process. The individual exchanges their clothing for our clothing, and then we find a housing spot for them, and our deputies take them out to the housing area and get them housed.
Dunne: Okay, and then when they're housed, talk about that, because obviously there are different levels of housing, if you will.
Rice: Yeah, we have basically two primary types of housing. We have single-cell housing, individual rooms where one person is to a room, and then we also have a dorm environment. We have three different sized dorms: one is a 48-person dorm, a second is a 36-person dorm, and then our other three dorms are 24-person dorms. So it's just one big dorm environment with bunk beds, and those individuals live together, eat together, watch TV together and just spend their time together.
Dunne: And then those that have to go to an individual cell, talk about why they go there instead.
Rice: Well, those who are in our individual cells, based on our classification, are ones that plainly put just aren't suitable to be around others in a dorm environment continuously. They might have mental health issues that prevent them from being able to maintain in that type of environment, or they just have antisocial behaviors. We also look at charges, so if somebody comes in with severe assault felonies, we want to keep them separate from individuals who don't have those types of charges. That could mean single-cell housing to help keep those individuals separate.
Dunne: As we were going through the tour, you brought up a subject a lot, and it's certainly a subject that a lot of people in law enforcement, or just in general, talk about, which is this idea of the mental health crisis that we have as a society, as a community. But you really see that here in the jail. Talk about that and how much that colors everything you do, including the capacity issue.
Rice: Yeah, we have a strong population that suffers from mental illness. It's unfortunate. We shouldn't be the last or the only option for officers on the streets to get help for people. I feel for the officers on the streets when they have somebody who's obviously suffering from mental illness but has committed a crime, let's say criminal trespass, but there's no place for them to necessarily take them, and so they come here. It's very challenging for us. We don't have the ability to provide proper medicational care. What I mean by that is we can't force an individual to take medications, for example. It has to be voluntary. So if you have somebody who's really mentally ill and they're choosing not to take these medications, we don't have any recourse, and it's really tough in that regard.
I'm really looking forward to what the county's doing with the crisis center and what we've done with setting up the deflection program. I'm hoping those programs, when they get up and fully running, will see some positive results here at the jail, and there will be places for people who don't belong in this lane to go and get proper help in the community.
Dunne: And as best you can, with whatever numbers or even just generalities, about how many people incarcerated here at the jail maybe could be somewhere else? Do you have even the roughest idea?
Rice: That's so tough, because to do that we're having to guess what the officer would have done in the moment. So on the street, was it that they really believed the best option was to come to jail, or if they had other options, would they have used them? I don't know, per se. But I can tell you this: We take a snapshot in time, like every quarter, and just look at our population for that day and ask how many of these individuals in our custody this day do we know suffer from mental illness. Every quarter we do this, we're at about 78%, so I can hypothesize that there would be a good chunk of these individuals who are here for what I'll call quality-of-life crimes.
Dunne: Oh, I see. So they're like criminal trespass. They don't have a place to go. I think if we had these other programs, they would be able to be served in a better way. How did you and your staff operate during COVID-19?
Rice: Oh, it was a very challenging time for all of us. I'm so proud of how our staff handled COVID-19. A vast majority of the positives we had were ones we caught at the time of booking, not because we had transmission within our facility. We had a very low transmission rate. Part of what we did was have meetings with public health, Dr. Luedtke. We met every week, reviewed our protocols and got updates on what they were seeing, so we could be prepared for any potential new waves, like when the variants came. Omicron was the one that kind of got us a little bit, because that was the most transmissible one, but for the most part we had very little transmission within the facility. We helped keep the process rolling by setting up little courtrooms. We went all virtual for court. We made sure the attorneys still had access to their clients. That was all thanks to the great work of our staff here, making sure we kept that going for everybody.
Dunne: You talked about your people, so I wanted to ask, what are some of the characteristics that make a good employee who works in, let's face it, a pretty unusual work setting?
Rice: Yeah, the chief deputy talks a lot about this: that we want to hire good quality people. We can teach people how to do this job, but we cannot teach ethics and morals. So we want people with strong ethics, strong morals, a good positive heart. This is a challenging job, a challenging career, but at the end of the day, we're here to help and serve our community, and that's what we're looking for: individuals who have that desire and that drive to serve.
Dunne: When you and I were taking the tour and you brought up your career, you said you kind of fell in love with working at a jail. What was it about it that made you choose to stay here for several decades, instead of going into patrol with the sheriff's office?
Rice: Yeah, for me it was a different form of service to our community. When you're working inside the corrections division, you're interacting with individuals who are experiencing challenges in their life for many different reasons, and being able to maybe mentor somebody in our facility, provide some guidance, show them a different path, and have those individuals leave our facility and take those lessons learned from all of our staff and actually apply them to their lives, and come back five years later to knock on the front door, so to speak, and say, ‘Hey, I want to check in and tell you how good I'm doing,’ to me, there's no greater feeling.
Dunne: Most of us who've never been to jail, a lot of our understanding is from fiction, from TV and movies. I'd love for you to spend a minute or two talking to people about the difference between what you've seen on something like “Special Victims Unit” and what really happens in a jail from a leadership perspective.
Rice: Yeah, I think when people see prisons or jails in the movies, it's always unhealthy, these barbaric conditions, and that's not what we have here. We have a medical staff that cares deeply about the individuals they're taking care of. We make sure individuals leave here with medication, or a prescription to get medication for free until they can find it in the community. We have individuals who come in very sick, and our medical staff take care of them and nurture them. We have deputies who take the time to talk to individuals and see them as a person, not just another object in a system, because that's not what individuals are here. They're people.
Dunne: Captain Greg Rice, thank you so much for taking me on a tour of the facility and for talking to us.
Rice: Hey, I'm happy to do so, and I'll just throw out to the public: we are willing to do tours. We should have a spot on our website where you can sign up for tours. So please, if you're interested in what we do here, we would love to show you.
Dunne: That's the show for today. All episodes of “Oregon on the Record” are available as a podcast at klcc.org. This year, the nation is celebrating the Route 66 Centennial, the 100th anniversary of the Mother Road. This Monday at 2 p.m., “Oregon on the Record” is taking the day off to bring you an award-winning documentary hosted by the late Martin Milner, star of the “Route 66” TV series. This special will guide you through the history, sites and influences of Route 66. I'm Michael Dunne, host of “Oregon on the Record.” Thanks for listening.
