The conditions have also led to small daily protests near the jail to raise awareness about the situation. In a statement on Facebook Monday evening, Murphree said the county jail passed its annual inspection last week and said the reports on social media, as well as reports of widespread COVID in the jail, are false.
According to Denton County Public Health, 44 inmates at the county jail have tested positive for the coronavirus, as well as 16 staffers. County health officials confirmed they received data last week from the state on the jail-wide testing.
A July 27 report from the Texas Commission on Jail Standards showed four current inmates had active positive results, indicating that many who have tested positive are no longer at the jail. Murphree said in early Jul y that all inmates and jailers would be tested for the coronavirus when 13 tested positive in the course of a few days. All 13 were women housed with three other women in the same pod — a big room with 48 beds and a common area for meals.
COVID policies at the jail released in late March included keeping new inmates housed separately from the rest of the jail population until two weeks after it becomes full. We do cohorting, which is what the CDC recommends — putting exposed individuals together when possible. Annemarie Aldrich, the store owner, said she and volunteers got to work sewing 2, masks for Denton County Jail inmates after they were requested. Now, photos have surfaced on social media showing inmates in a COVIDpositive pod wearing paper masks.
Why are we now seeing pictures of these inmates wearing paper masks when we provided them with reusable masks? Cloth masks, on the other hand, would have to be washed regularly.
She said that to make masks for the jail, volunteers pressed pause on making masks for other organizations, such as people experiencing homelessness and the Navajo Nation. When she called the county jail on Saturday, she said a person at the front desk told her she had no idea about the masks and that staffers had to buy their own masks. Sorry , an error occurred. Get Started. Log In. You are logged in. Switch accounts.
Offers go here. Choose wisely! We won't share it with anyone else. If you forget it, you'll be able to recover it using your email address. Join our mailing lists Best of the Blotter Would you like to receive our Weekly Blotter email newsletter? The visitation system currently in place Denton, as well as other counties where Securus operates, works like this: Video chats at the jail are offered to family and friends at no charge, while video chats done at home are offered for a fee, on the assumption that you're going to be lazy since it's all video anyway and just pay for the video chat from home.
The money goes back to the county and Securus, a jail telecommunications company already notorious for its technical glitches and excessive fees on jail phone calls. Prisoners' rights advocates complain that video visitation is less intimate and increases the odds of recidivism by cutting off inmates from family and friends, and research in Travis County has shown that inmate violence went up after in-person visits were phased out.
To test it out, I arranged a visit with an inmate through Securus. This was a free, on-site visit. The "visitation room" is in the Denton government center and looks like a computer lab. The Denton County Sheriff's office still treats it like an old-fashioned visitation room: personal items, including purses, are banned. The visitation had to be arranged a few days in advance through the Securus site. The visits last 20 minutes each. Because I was late, I got a shorter visit.
Editor's note: Welcome to our world, inmate. The computer software keeps people on a set schedule that makes visitation incredibly efficient but also inflexible.
Since we still talked through the pay phones used in traditional visits, you can't hear the man's responses in the recording I took. The inmate, Richard Powell, said he thought the system wasn't bad.
Powell said he violated probation from an earlier drug possession conviction. MVI from amy silverstein on Vimeo. The most obvious downside is that we're only talking to about three quarters of each other's heads. Support Us Dallas' independent source of local news and culture.
Denton County Jail inmates must reuse masks, many of which have holes, according to activist Jessica Luther Rummel. Jessica Luther Rummel. Coronavirus-infected inmates are also allegedly deprived of functioning masks; they often must reuse the ones they do have, some of which are filled with holes. Many of those women have not yet been convicted of a crime, she said. Luther Rummel said she was made aware of the living conditions after speaking with female inmates during a video conference call earlier this month.
She Lost Her Pregnancy, Anyway. I support. Support the independent voice of Dallas and help keep the future of Dallas Observer free. Support Us. Keep Dallas Observer Free. A screenshot from Jessica Luther Rummel's video conference call with Denton County Jail inmates appears to show a large pile of trash.
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