The Buncombe County Detention Center is taking steps to decrease the smuggling of contraband into the facility. The changes come nearly a month after Sheriff Quentin Miller called for increased investment to do so, during his presentation to the county board of commissioners.
After an inmate passes through two sets of electro-mechanical locked doors -- they get their first check for contraband.
“We do an initial pat down for weapons,” Major Daryl Fisher said.
A more thorough check currently takes place in the next room, in booking, after a magistrate judge determines a bond. That was a change made in 2014 to improve the flow of the intake process and to keep arresting officers from getting bogged down. But that hasn’t proven to be as big of a concern.
“Now we’re not seeing that. And we’re also seeing, of course as you know, the rise in the opioid issues, and folks sneaking contraband into the jail,” Capt. Tony Gould said. “So we’re going to put the searches back out here and taking the property out here.”
Another upgrade planned for the intake process is the addition of a $130,000 piece of technology, called a Smiths Detection B-Scan Unit. It’s an x-ray scanner used to detect concealed items, most often drugs, on or inside a person’s body. It’ll go in a separate room that’s considered part of the central booking area.
“The idea is do everything we can to prevent the inmate from having that contraband, that material, whether it’s a substance or an item,” Capt. Gould said. “Because it’s going to harm somebody, whether it’s one of us, another inmate, it’s going to be a bad result, I’m sure.”
Currently, officers don’t have the ability to detect whether an inmate is concealing drugs, like a bag of pills. Lt. Jeffrey Luttrell says incidents of smuggling substances into the jail are frequent, sometimes occurring twice a week.
“It just goes in phases too,” Luttrell said. “We’ll have one week where we have four inmates sent out. They got a hold of something in the tank, and that was back to back to back to back.”
He adds, sometimes an inmate will smuggle in several pills and share them with others.
The Sheriff’s office says the improvements are expected to take four weeks. In the meantime, Sheriff Quentin Miller is also requesting the addition of four intake specialists and a detective for the purpose of reducing and investigating incidents of contraband entering the detention facility, which is a felony offense.