Murphy – Law enforcement officials say a new body scanner in the Cherokee County Detention Center has already paid for itself.
Officials say a recent arrestee intentionally swallowed the top metal portion of a cigarette lighter in an effort to avoid incarceration.
“She swallowed it for the purpose of getting out of jail and going to the hospital,” Sheriff Derrick Palmer said. “She thought that we would take her to the hospital and hold her there if she had a foreign object inside of her that could be causing damage and didn't know where it was.”
To her surprise, jail officials used a new full-body security scanner to track the object as it moved through her system.
“Every so often they would put her in the scanner and track it,” Palmer said. “A person can be scanned up to 1,000 times per year (on the lowest setting) before radiation exposure becomes a concern.”
Officials say the machine eliminated the need to take the woman to the hospital, thereby saving the county money. In addition, the body scanner has deterred arrestees from smuggling drugs and other contraband into the jail since obtaining the machine about a month ago.
“When they see the detector, they’re not even trying it,” Palmer said. “On multiple occasions, people have said, ‘Yeah, I'm hiding something,’ and they retrieve it. If one person had made it in here with drugs and people overdosed and died, there could have been millions of dollars worth of lawsuits.”
Officials are also using the machine to scan mail for drugs. Authorities say inmates and their families routinely label mail containing drugs as legal correspondence to prevent jail staff from opening it.
“Inmates will always come up with new, creative ways to smuggle stuff into jail and accidents will happen, but this scanner greatly reduces the liability of the detention center,” Palmer said.
Law enforcement officials had been advocating to purchase a body scanner for at least three years prior to approval by county commissioners earlier this year. The machine cost about $147,800.