Orient Road Jail: A Microcosm of Society…Except That Your Every Move Is Recorded as a Public Document

I expected the Hillsborough County Jail to be a scary place with bars and yelling officers and tough inmates. However, from Lt. Scott Smith’s tour, it seems that the jail is not much different from the world we live in, except, of course, the freedom to leave the building. Inmates have three meals a day, a bunk to sleep in, reading material, television, and recreation. They have access to medical, dental, and psychiatric care. In addition, any of the problems you could imagine on the outside they have on the inside. We could not see any of the inmates because of the threat of spreading swine flu.

In regards to our class, the major difference between freedom and jail life is the amount of public records that are kept about the inmates’ every move. All footage captured on the security cameras are kept for two weeks. This is for the protection of the deputies and the inmates. So, if you were to do a story on a jail fight that lead to one inmate killing another, a broadcast journalist could access the security tape in the next two weeks following the incident and air it as supporting evidence. A Phoenix TV station did that and proved that the Sheriff’s Office's story did not line up with the video’s evidence of the incident (Read the full story here). The jail keeps the booking video for forty nine months for evidence in “use of force” cases like the quadriplegic dumping video we all saw last February.

The news stations and newspapers got that video because it is public record. Inmates in confinement are watched twenty four hours a day by a deputy who records their every move. Another public record. Any incident reports that are filed while the inmate is in the jail are public. As we learned at the HCSO, CRA’s are also public. Are you noticing a pattern here?

Even the prisoners phone calls and visitation records are public. For this reason, most lawyers warn them not to discuss anything over the phone. However, Lt. Scott Smith explained that many times they can catch inmates with drugs or other contraband because they discuss their wrongdoing over the phone. These phone records are fairly easy to access, too. Each inmate must punch in their identification number to make a phone call. To get a specific recording, a reporter must simply request the phone records for an inmate’s ID number with a certain date and time. Unfortunately, the lieutenant said that interviewing a deputy who dealt with a certain inmate is prohibited. In this case you would be sent to a PIO.

I’ve never planned on going to jail, and I still don’t. This trip has sealed the deal. I think, beyond all the security and supervision, the most humiliating and freedom infringing aspect of jail is the lack of privacy. When you go to jail you are on the radar 24/7 and everything you do is a matter of public record. When you end up in jail, your privacy comes to an end.