County Expansion Goes High Tech
When officers walk the expanded Rensselaer County NY Jail next year thry may have a heavy ring of keys jingling on their hip and a PDA in their hand. The old ways of corrections will meet high-tech reality in the $37 million expansion that will add 192 cells, giving the county room for 435 inmates in the South Troy correctional facility. Reported by the Troy Times Union.
Inmates will wear bracelets with bar codes and be watched by nearly 450 surveillance cameras. A correction officer or Sheriff Jack Mahar will be able to zoom in with a PDA to locate an inmate and see what he’s doing at any moment. “It will be really different. We put a lot of thought into this,” said Mahar, known in the county for appreciating the savings technology can bring.
The jail will be the first in the region with personal digital assistants, Mahar said Wednesday during a tour of the new construction. Besides carrying the PDAs, officers also will gain access to locked areas using swipe cards and biometrics that will read either their fingerprints or conduct a retinal scan. They’ll still need big jail keys to open some locked doors.
Inmates processed through the new booking area also will sit in a high-tech scanning chair that will detect if they have any hidden metal objects. Inmates are expected to be quieter, too. Plans call for giving each prisoner wireless headsets to listen to televisions playing in the cell blocks …
The new jail wing, with its four pods of 48 cells each, is expected to open in December or January. Most of the construction work will be completed in the late fall. Besides the high-tech monitoring systems, the jail will have expanded kitchen facilities, a larger visiting area, expanded locker rooms for correction officers and more classroom space. Even the department’s canine teams will get space for kennels.
NY Rensselaer County, New York, Prison and Jail Construction