Kudos to Jefferson County Judge Gerald Robinson and Jefferson County Sheriff Lafayette Woods Jr.
The threat of the spread of covid-19 pandemic is taken seriously in some corners and not so seriously in others. It was good to read in The Commercial recently that these two public officials are erring on the side of caution.
At the Jefferson County Courthouse, Robinson appears to be ready at a moment’s notice to take action if action is needed. Twice in the past, he has already closed the courthouse and had employees work from home so that he could get the building disinfected.
“I have said that if we have any pickup of the infection in the courthouse, I’m prepared to shut the courthouse down again,” Robinson told our reporter, Dale Ellis. “Or any county building, for that matter.”
That is about as clear a directive as they come.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
Robinson said that in June, a member of the security staff tested positive, which was enough to cause him to “immediately sanitize the building.”
And inside the courthouse, things are buttoned up tight, as well. Officials there are limiting the number of people who come in, and the ones who do come in have to wear masks and practice social distancing at all times. That’s good advice for everyone.
Across the way, at the jail, the pandemic is being treated with additional respect, which is consistent with the threat of viral spread in such a closed environment.
The sheriff has installed a camera that detects a person’s temperature, eliminating the need for an employee to have to approach a visitor to manually check for a fever.
Then there are the regular cleanings the jail and juvenile justice center get. To do that, employees use a chemical sprayer that, Woods said, gets rid of many different viruses, including the one that causes the coronavirus.
“We started early on putting measures in place to limit potential exposure from the outside,” Woods said.
Perhaps most important is that those measures also include limiting the exposure from the jail occupants themselves. Because the more people who are kept in the jail equates to a higher risk of an outbreak, the sheriff is holding down the overall inmate numbers, meaning if the crime involved isn’t violent, then the person arrested for it is likely not going to be brought into the jail.
“(W)e’ve turned away quite a few,” he said, referring to people who, pre-covid, would have been taken in. “Unless it’s serious, like physical assault with a weapon, homicide or if it’s domestic and the person is actually on-site, we’ll take those as well.”
Woods is using common sense. If a person was arrested for something violent, they will be sleeping in the jail, covid-19 or not.
“The thing about that is, we don’t want to turn somebody loose and the next thing you know it’s a homicide,” he said.
Still, it’s not an easy task keeping inmates safe and, when necessary, separated. The reason is that when someone is brought in, they have to be quarantined for 14 days before being placed with the general jail population. Even though that part of the precaution protocol keeps the handful of holding cells busy, doing that is essential to taking a firm hold on the pandemic’s threat. As Woods put it, if the virus ever spreads inside, it’s game over.
“If the virus gets loose in the general population,” he said, “that’s it. It’ll go through this facility, and there’s no way to stop it.”