New jail nears completion

Henry County Sheriff’s Lt. Col. Steve Eanes served as the guide during a recent tour of the county’s new jail. Eanes is pictured in the male work-release pod of the jail, marked with a yellow line. Inmates in this pod will never come into contact with the rest of the jail population, thus reducing the amount of contraband entering the facility.

By Callie Hietala

Construction of the new Henry County Adult Detention Center is on time and on budget, Henry County Administrator Tim Hall said several times during the Henry County Board of Supervisors annual planning session, which this year was held in the soon-to-be-completed jail facility. (See related story.)

Several members of the Henry County Board of Supervisors and other officials gathered outside of the jail’s master control room which, Lt. Col. Steve Eanes said, will be staffed by 1 or 2 people charged with controlling all the locks, watching 550+ cameras, and maintaining the security of the facility.

The Board of Supervisors, county officials, and members of the media toured the facility by Lt. Col. Steve Eanes of the Henry County Sheriff’s Department.

The $70 million, 400-bed facility was constructed at the former DuPont site, bringing new life to the former brownfield that was unused for several decades.

The former industrial site had issues with hazardous materials and, according to Deputy County Administrator Dale Wagoner, was an eyesore in the community. DuPont, he said, took the necessary steps to make the site environmentally sound and safe.

Wagoner said the site selection was a methodical process, which included public hearings. “We’ve been totally transparent with the board and the public the whole way,” he said.

The budget, Wagoner said, was approved by the Virginia Department of Corrections, which will reimburse the county up to 25 percent of that total construction amount, and “we’re still in line to get 25 percent of every dollar that we spend back.”

Looking out from an open security desk in a minimum-security pod. In this space, the jail will employ direct supervision rather than having officers monitor inmates from a control room. The theory, Lt. Col. Steve Eanes said, is that inmates and officers can get used to each other, hopefully creating a better relationship and building a bond of trust that will carry on once the inmate is released.

He said the county was criticized for spending $1.2 million to demolish a brick structure and concrete pad that still stood on the site. “We took that $1.2 million worth of dilapidated building and concrete, put it through a rock crusher, and created $3 million worth of rock that’s sitting under the foundation of this (building), under the asphalt in the parking lot.”

One side of the video visitation booths. When entering the facility, Lt. Col. Steve Eanes said families will sit at a monitor and speak to their loved one who is on a screen in their pod. “We can allow more visitation than we ever have before to give them contact with their families and their loved ones,” he added.

Wagoner said the jail will be ready to house inmates beginning April 1.

Henry County Sherriff Lane Perry said, “this has been a project that’s a long time in coming, but I want to say thank you. I want to thank you on behalf of our officers because you all came and saw what our current jail looked like … I also want to say I’m thankful on behalf of the inmates. One of the things is managing personality types, managing issues they might be fighting. Now we can control that a lot better, we can be more effective, we can have more people in here helping inmates out. There’s numerous people who are going to come in here and talk to them about their life, there are people who are going to come in here and help them with their reading skills, GED, and other things.”

Hall said, “There are things in this facility that we cannot do in the old facility—mental health work, work release, things of that nature. The medical facility is second to none.”

A peek inside one of the control rooms in the jail.

6 Looking through the window into the jail’s kitchen area.

“I’ve always believed that incarceration should be a holistic approach,” he continued. “You want to take the person that has made the mistake and needs to pay for that mistake, but you also want to do all you can to make sure they don’t come back, and if we can help them with job release, with mental health services, with medical services, get them out of here and get them to be a productive member of society,” that is one of the major goals of the facility.