Detention personnel at the Kend- all County Jail now have an “eye in the sky” to monitor inmates, but the extra security during an upcoming expansion almost didn’t happen due to budget-saving measures.
A walkthrough of the jail on the ground level quickly shows how little visibility there is of the jail pods – of which there are six for men and three for women housing eight to 12 prison- ers each – from the cinderblock-lined, windowless halls separating the com- munal rooms.
However, a stairwell tucked away behind a series of doors leads up to a dystopian grey room with angled win- dows lining the floor and walls that look over the pods, allowing guards a greater vantage point.
“This is, I guess, a catwalk on ste- roids,” Sheriff Al Auxier told The Star. “Because I guess it’s not open looking down. It’s not like two stories with a walkway looking down. It’s an actual floor closed off, segregated and separate, but you have visibility in windows that allow you to look down into every open (one) of those pods down there. So, they call it the ‘eye in the sky.’”
During a meeting last week, Kendall County commission- ers discussed the possibility of eliminating a second eye in the sky from the ongoing jail expansion project, but the estimated $1 million cost savings didn’t appear to outweigh the benefits of this second vantage point.
“So, if it had come in as a $2 million to $3 million savings, I would’ve said let’s look at it,” Precinct 3 Commissioner Richard Chapman said. “But saving $1 million, while that’s a lot of money, just the additional load that it would put on the jail staff to have two sep- arate systems working within one building, personally, I don’t think is the right way to go.”
In the end, the commissioners opted to retain the second vantage point in the jail expansion project, but urged the architects and engineers working on the initiative to see what other cost-saving measures can be employed.
The jail reached its 102-inmate capacity shortly after its construction in 2019, and Auxier repeatedly has said the number of inmates will fill the new expansion quickly.
The jail was built with a 5,000-square-foot expansion to accommodate an additional 48 prisoners. However, with the number of inmates being transported to Kerr County and other jails because of a lack of space, some observers say the expansion seems to be more in line with a game of catchup.
Auxier confirmed under current conditions, the jail expansion would be teetering on capacity with the 10 percent buffer in jail beds staff must maintain to allow for emergency situations or moving inmates.
Beyond the increased visibility, Auxier said this eye- in-the-sky system encourages inmates to be on their best behavior because they don’t know if officers are observing, and, more notably, inmates don’t know when detention personnel aren’t watching.
“See on a catwalk, they know you’re up there observ- ing or whatever,” Auxier said. “(With this system) you have the advantage to be able to observe without them (inmates) knowing you’re observing. So, the inmates have no idea that you’re actually up there looking at them.”
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