Wabash County Jail Essay

A jail is a place of confinement for anyone who commits a crime, and they can be held there for up to one year depending upon the nature of their crime. The Wabash and Miami County Jails both hold their inmates to keep them out of their communities. However, the Wabash County Jail and Miami County Jail have many differences that set them apart from each other, such as the building designs, the rights of visitation, and the differences in capacities between the two facilities. Starting off, one of the first differences I noticed as I walked through the doors of either facility is the way the building has been built or set up. Wabash’s jail holds inmates in a linear type of fashion, which means that inmates are in cells lined up one after the other right next to each other. Linear jails are also known as “intermittent surveillance” and also come with drawbacks. Linear jails typically have low surveillance, and more instances of contraband, rape, homicide, suicide, and other inmate problems because guards are not always readily at watch while they are on
Wabash’s jail uses the linear cell design, which provides less supervision, while the Miami County facility uses the pod design, which gives the officers more leverage to watch the inmates. Second is population; Wabash Jail is very overcrowded in that its capacity is 72, yet it currently holds 86, and Miami County’s jail design allows the jail to inhabit from 240 to 250 inmates, and currently houses 152. The last major difference between the two jails is the visitation rights. Miami County has their inmates use either video visitation or a call over the phone, while in Wabash the inmates are allowed to be face to face with their visitor instead of having to stay in their cell rooms. The two jails are contrasting in many of the ways they were built and