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| Federal inmates pulled from Caldwell jail |
| By The Charlotte Observer |
| Published: 08/27/2003 |
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U.S. marshals removed all federal prisoners from the Caldwell County, N.C., jail this week and temporarily suspended the county's contract to house those inmates. The decision came after Kevin Maurice Linder, 26, escaped from the 4-year-old jail Thursday by walking through an unsecured door and slipping under a fence. He was caught two days later. 'After our investigation into the escape and the sheriff's own internal review, we felt very uneasy with the way things are now as far as lapses in security,' Deputy Marshal Steve Gladden said Wednesday. 'We're not canceling the contract, we're just asking them to review their own security at that facility to make certain changes.' Those changes include: Fixing the three electronic doors leading to the central 'day room,' above which guards watch inmates from a control tower, adding alarms and sensors to the rest of the jail's doors and fences and installing razor wire between the two fences separating the jail from the outside -- a feature in many jails. In addition, marshals want jail officials to refine their head-count and notification procedures. Linder, who was serving an 18-year sentence for drug offenses, escaped between 5:30 and 6 p.m. Jail staff didn't know he was gone until an 8 p.m. count. And jail staff didn't notify the Marshals Service until 7:30 a.m. Saturday, more than 13 hours after the escape. Jail Administrator Capt. George Marley estimates the work will cost between $16,000 and $18,000, and be completed by the end of next week. He will outline a plan to fix the marshals' procedural concerns at a meeting with them Tuesday. 'We're taking steps and redoing everything to provide the security we need to hold federal prisoners,' Marley said. 'It's one thing for one of our local boys to escape, but it's another thing when a federal guy escapes.' The 32-county western district office of the Marshals Service houses inmates serving federal sentences in six county jails: Mecklenburg, Caldwell, Burke, Buncombe, Swain and York, S.C. Caldwell has housed federal inmates, at a rate of $45 per day, since the new 185-bed jail opened in 1999. Federal inmates usually make up less than a third of the jail's population, Marley said. Of the 175 inmates in the jail Monday, 42 were serving federal sentences. They were moved to the Mecklenburg jail in Charlotte. Linder was taken there Saturday after he was found at a home in Lenoir. Linder crawled under the fence in a part of the exercise yard officials recently opened to prisoners. The security flaws have been there since the jail was constructed, but they went unnoticed because no one was in that part of the jail before spring, Marley said. |
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