Three months after an inmate died from an overdose of fentanyl and acetyl fentanyl, Franklin County sheriff's office announced Thursday a new TSA-style body scanner will soon be used at the Jackson Pike jail.
Deputies have struggled to do thorough searches of the roughly 40,000 inmates who enter county corrections facilities each year because Ohio law dictates how someone can be searched depending on the charges they are facing.
"If you come in under felony charges, you are searched to a greater degree than you are with a misdemeanor charge, which presents a problem for us because if you can't search everyone to the same degree, items can be smuggled in," Franklin County Sheriff Dallas Baldwin said. "Once inside, they can go anywhere. So it's very, very difficult."
The sheriff's office began efforts to acquire the equipment four years ago in hopes of keeping contraband out of the jail, former Franklin County Sheriff Zach Scott said at a news briefing at the Jackson Pike facility. The process to get the scanner continued once Baldwin was elected.
The SOTER RS full body security scanner manufactured by Security North America will allow deputies to scan inmates from head to toe in about 10 seconds and then examine the detailed images on a touch screen. Demo images showed more than a dozen balloons of drugs someone has swallowed embedded in the intestinal tract.
The machine cost approximately $124,000. To outfit the jail for the scanner, another $9,650 was spent, said Marc Gofstein, a spokesman for the sheriff's office.
Officials said the new jail, which is under construction on Fisher Road and is set to open in late 2019, also will be equipped with the scanners.
Once deputies are trained on how to use the machine and read images, it will be used to scan a majority of the incoming inmates at the 1,700-bed Jackson Pike facility. Officials estimate the machine will be in use about a month from now. Some inmates with medical conditions may be exempt from being scanned, said Franklin County Sheriff's Chief Deputy Penny Perry, who oversees corrections.
The county does not keep statistics on how much contraband is found at the corrections facilities, but officials said it's a problem.
"Weapons, mostly narcotics. There's other items that come in," Baldwin said.
On Oct. 1, 29-year-old Brent Gibney, who was facing charges in connection to a bank robbery, was found unconscious in a Downtown jail cell. He died three days later at OhioHealth Grant Medical Center. His mother, Debbie Gibney, has questioned how drugs were able to get into the facility.
"They should have had this a long time ago and our son would still be alive," she said.
Officials said inmate overdose deaths are rare at the facilities. The last one was in 2008.
In some cases across the country, smuggling contraband into corrections facilities has been traced back to deputies. That contraband can lead to drug use by inmates and sometimes give them the tools to escape. Staff members and deputies working at the Jackson Pike jail, however, are not going to be scanned for now, Perry said.
"At this time, no. ... I'm sure we probably will in the future," she said.
Dispatch reporter Kimball Perry contributed to this report.
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