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Nelson
will seek a fourth term
A country boy and his cattle dog
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The story behind the mug shot |
County jail's system for booking people is
mechanical, sometimes humiliating |
By Gunnar
Olson, Newberg Graphic
reporter
E-mail Gunnar at golson@eaglenewspapers.com
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Mug shots from the county jail are a mainstay in newspapers. Editors
love them because they put faces to names. They also give readers a
glimpse of people that run from police officers, drink and drive,
sell methamphetamine or commit unspeakable acts.
The hundreds of
mug shots taken each month at the Yamhill County jail are similar to
those taken across the state and country: The accused or convicted,
often at one of the lowest points in their lives, appear before a
drab background, looking directly into the camera.
Yet each picture is different: Many people wear blank expressions.
Some scowl. Others smile as if they don’t know what else to do
before a camera.
“That picture tells a million stories,” inmate Ed Weigel said on a
recent afternoon while being booked into the Yamhill County jail.
This is an attempt at telling a part of those stories, to go behind
the scenes — behind the jailer’s camera, if you will — to ask
questions about an experience known by many but not all: What is it
like to get booked into jail? To have your mug shot taken?
Approximately 5,000 people are booked at the Yamhill County
jail each year. Not all of them spend time in jail, but all of them
get a mug shot.
Lt. Ron Huber, who supervises the jail, said the booking process is
mechanical, like a production line. For those spending time in jail,
it gives a taste of what is to come: These men and women are making
a transition from a relatively free society to months or years of
eating when told to eat and sleeping when someone else turns off the
light.
“The booking process is a dehumanizing, humiliating part of coming
into custody,” Huber said.
Having a mug shot taken is an oftentimes embarrassing moment when
their visit to jail is recorded in local history. Yet people’s
emotions before the jailer’s camera aren’t limited to sadness and
shame, as is evident in the wide variety of facial expressions shown
in mug shots.
Dep. Dave Lux started working at the jail in 1994, and he has seen
people in all sorts of moods while taking their mug shots.
Depressed. Angry. Happy.
Happy?
“Yeah, believe it or not,” he said.
From a visitor’s point of view
The Yamhill County jail is located in downtown McMinnville, next to
the county courthouse. It is not quite the size of a city block and
holds community living quarters for 263 inmates. It is constructed
largely of cinder block and painted an institutional tan inside and
out.
Visitors enter the jail through a door that leads from the main
parking lot into a small reception area with pale lighting. Inside
is a counter, shielded in glass. A locked door leads into the
labyrinth of hallways connecting the original jail, built in 1968,
with additions built in 1991 and 1998.
Here, more thick glass separates the “pods” of cells from
passageways used by deputies. The glass is one-way glass, to the
advantage of the deputies, but inmates can see out if they get close
enough to the glass; they’re not supposed to, however, and deputies
tap the glass if they catch an inmate trying to sneak a peak.
Huber, who oversees the 19 deputies who work at the jail and helps
manage the $4.7 million annual budget, compared the jail to a small
city.
It is required by law to supply inmates’ every need — places to
eat, sleep and go to the bathroom, as well as lighting, heating and
air conditioning. There’s even a counselor and a visiting dentist,
though the dentist does nothing but extract bad teeth.
In this way, the Yamhill County jail is largely self-contained.
About the only thing that can’t be handled internally is a medical
emergency.
Sheriff’s point of view
Sheriff Jack Crabtree requires new deputies to start in the jail.
That’s where he started in 1985.
Crabtree said it used to be that deputies kept quiet about whether
they liked working in the jail for fear of being assigned there on a
permanent basis. But to Crabtree’s way of thinking, working at the
jail is “priceless experience,” and he made it mandatory for every
new deputy when he was elected sheriff.
Working the jail, deputies are exposed to the “criminal element”
every day, he said. They learn who they are and how they operate.
And, most importantly, he said, deputies learn to communicate with
them. Additionally, if deputies move to patrol duty, they usually
have a much easier time arresting someone they got to know from time
that person had previously spent in jail.
“There’s not any book or school that can give you that kind of
experience,” Crabtree said.
Huber said deputies have to learn to use their heads. They don’t
carry guns, so they must rely first on their people skills when
someone turns unruly, as opposed to immediately reaching for their
gun. The jail also teaches deputies what it means to a person’s life
to be put in jail.
From an inmate’s point of view
People being booked into jail enter it out of sight from the main
parking lot, through a garage door in the rear of the building. The
door is opened by an officer and closed again before the inmates are
let out of the transport bus or squad car. The soon-to-be inmates
are brought in this way, Huber explained, in case they are
uncooperative.
Years ago, officers would get physical with people who resisted
entering the jail, Huber said. Today, he said, officers are more
likely to try to out-wait the person — with the garage door down,
there’s no where for them to go. And, as Huber noted, nowadays, any
form of physical contact has to be meticulously documented.
Voluntarily or not, new inmates take their first steps into the
Yamhill County jail out of public view.
When the they ready, an officer leads them up a ramp to a
door and into another room. This initial holding room is called
“intake.” The name implies its purpose; the room is where people
wait while the officer fills out the necessary paperwork to turn
them over to the jail’s custody.
The room is not one of comforts. A wood bench lines one wall, and
behind it are short bars built into the wall to which an officer can
handcuff a person. On the floor is red line for conducting sobriety
tests. And in one corner is a breathalyzer machine, should the
person’s blood-alcohol content needs to be recorded (it is used more
often on Friday nights). A video camera records all that goes on in
this room, as do the other 76 cameras throughout the jail. The
footage can be used in court to show drunkenness or belligerence, if
need be.
In the intake room is also a kind of two-wheel cart with a chair
welded to it. It looks like the sort of device that Hannibal Lector
is carted around on in “The Silence of the Lambs,” but a sitting
version without the face mask. It is seldom used, Huber said, maybe
a few times a year.
More often, in fact with every visit, people are subjected to
searches. Officers are supposed to find any weapons on people before
reaching this point, but a weapon occasionally slips through. Just
this month an officer took a knife off of a woman in the intake
room, Huber said; she had hidden it in her bra. Mostly, these
searches produce drugs, the possession of which is documented by the
officer, sometimes leading to additional charges; Huber said the
drugs are destroyed.
The average of 30 to 40 minutes that people spend in the intake
room is not technically time spent “in jail.” Huber said the people
are not considered to be inside the jail until they walk through the
next door.
More of sheriff’s point of view
Crabtree said an important part of the deputies’ experience in the
jail comes while in the booking room, where all of the corrections
deputies take turns working. Here, he said, deputies regularly deal
with the extreme emotions of inmates.
“At that point, they are often subdued, down and out, and
depressed,” Crabtree said. “They’re wanting to basically lay their
whole life out to you, which is an opportunity for a corrections
deputy to see a different side of the criminal element, which is a
side you absolutely don’t see on the street. If you listen to what
they’re saying, you learn a great deal. ‘Cause oftentimes, they pour
out a great deal to you.
“Other times,” he went on, “they’re extremely combative. In that
case, it gives corrections deputies a chance to learn to deal with
most difficult situation ... from fighting to kicking to spitting.”
The booking room
The booking room doesn’t look as inhospitable as the intake room
does — no strap-in chairs here — but it’s not like the deputies are
rolling out the red carpet. The dominant feature is a counter,
deputies on one side, inmates on the other. The booking room seems
to be a cross between a hotel lobby and a DMV office. Indeed, many
of its functions are similar.
There is a short, dead-end hallway in one corner of the booking
room, at the end of which the people strip off their street clothes
and put on blue shirts and pants that look like nurses’ scrubs. They
give their possessions, clothes and all, to the deputies, who put
the stuff in clear plastic bags, seal the bags, and put the bags in
locker-like cubbies in an adjoining room, where their belongings
will stay until the inmates are released or transferred to another
jail.
Inmates are also required to give deputies the pieces of their
identity that they can’t take off and put in a bag — a finger print
and a close-up picture of their face. These are not done the way
they used to be, with ink pads and flash bulbs. But what the new
technologies lack in character, they make up in effectiveness.
Their fingerprints, taken electronically, are sent to a statewide
database and from there to a nationwide database. Most mug shots
wouldn’t get a widespread viewing before the days of the Internet.
Several would make it into the newspaper, but they would represent
only a fraction of the total. Today, the mug shot of every inmate at
Yamhill County jail, be they convicted or only accused, is available
for anyone with access to the Web to see. All that Internet surfers
need do to see the faces of everyone in jail is go to the county’s
Web site — www.co.yamhill.or.us — and click on the link “Inmate
Roster” on the left-hand side of the page.
As Huber said, the process of booking is like a production line.
There’s even an overflow room if there are too many people to book
at once.
From here, inmates are sent to an initial holding pod, where,
deputies hope, any drugs that have been smuggled in by wrapping them
in plastic and swallowing them work their way through inmates’
system and are confiscated. Inmates are held here for about two days
before being assigned to a pod within the jail.
Booking room conversations
There was no kicking or spitting in the booking room last Thursday.
The few inmates being booked at the time were the subdued kind.
Listen:
“What now?” a deputy asked as a man being escorted into the booking
room.
“Just a minor altercation,” said the man, who was being booked and
released.
“Nothing is minor,” the deputy said.
“Well ...”
The sheriff could have predicted such an exchange. It is similar to
the kind of conversation Crabtree said is a common one here, that of
a person leaving:
“‘Mr. Crabtree,’” he said, imitating inmates about to be freed,
“‘you won’t see me again.’
“I say, ‘OK. Well, good luck.’”
A week later they’re back in jail. “They say, ‘Well, you know, I
been planning to (go straight), but things come up.’”
Point of view of two men getting their mug shot taken
Sven Blanz, 19, figured he has had his mug shot taken about 20
times between the different jails he’s been in because of his seven
arrests. Blanz, who was arrested in Jackson County, which is holding
Blanz in one of the beds it rents from Yamhill County jail, said it
varies how a person feels looking at the camera, knowing their mug
shot could end up in their hometown newspaper.
“It
just depends on the mood you’re in,” he said. “If you’ve got people
out there, you’re crying.”
Blanz is originally from California, but lived most recently in the
Medford area. He said he was arrested for trying to pass his
sister’s checks. He did it, he said, because he was “too lazy to get
a job.” He said the money was not for drugs.
Later, Huber took exception to that. “What he’s probably not
telling you is about the drugs,” he said, then ticking off his
reasons for being suspicious: “He needed money. He’s 19. He’s
had seven arrests.”
Blanz said he was mad having his mug shot taken this time. “Because
I was working and I had everything going,” he said.
Weigel, the inmate who said mug shots tell a million stories,
guessed that he has had his mug shot taken 13 times. He simply
stares at the camera.
“It’s not like you’re sitting there posing for a picture,” said
Weigel, 45, of Shaw.
Weigel, who said he used to work part-time in maintenance at A-dec
Inc., the Newberg-based dental equipment manufacturer, said his
problems with the law began about one year ago and snowballed. He
was arrested on a hit-and-run after an accident in Newberg because,
he said, he went to Fred Meyer to use the restroom before returning
to the scene of the accident. After that, he was arrested for
driving while his license was suspended, though, as he put it, his
suspension started before it was supposed to and that’s why he got
the second charge. Still, he put the responsibility of his being in
jail solely on himself.
“Nobody got me here but me,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said, it’s embarrassing to see your mug shot in
the newspaper. Especially because, as he put it, mug shots are about
as flattering to people as DMV photos.
“Some of the pictures don’t do people justice, but you get it
there,” he said. “You get it there by not complying (with the law).”
As he saw it, a bigger injustice was printing of mug shots of
people who are later cleared of criminal allegations. He said a mug
shot “sets a certain thing in people’s minds.”
“Maybe they should publish one when you’re acquitted,” he said.
One, he added, that shows a smile on their faces. |
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From
March 1,
2006, Newberg Graphic
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