New scanner improves search for contraband

By JUSTIN WIER

jwier@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

New Scanner at Mahoning County Jail

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A new body scanner will help prevent inmates from smuggling drugs and weapons into the Mahoning County jail, officials said.

A new body scanner will help prevent inmates from smuggling drugs and weapons into the Mahoning County jail, officials said.

Deputy sheriffs received training over the past two days in the use of a new airport-style X-ray scanner that will help deputies find contraband on inmates before the jail accepts them.

The scanner is already in use.

“I don’t have to tell you how creative people will get to get things in the jail,” Sheriff Jerry Greene said.

Because many inmates are in the jail on pretrial detention, there are limitations on the searches the deputies can conduct, the sheriff said. The scanner is a legal way to make sure people aren’t concealing contraband.

The Ohio Department of Corrections uses the technology in its facilities, and it’s become more common in county jails over the past couple of years.

“With the opioid epidemic and all the heroin making its way upstairs, it’s needed,” Maj. William Cappabianca said.

The jail had two nonfatal overdoses in 2016 when a third inmate smuggled suspected fentanyl into the jail in a body cavity.

“This is going to cut way, way down on that,” Greene said.

The noninvasive scans penetrate clothing and can reveal contraband in body cavities. The training focuses on how to recognize containers and plastic bags on the scan, Greene said.

He added that sergeants will receive the required training to train others in using the scanner.

The scanner emits less radiation than medical X-ray technology. It exposes the operator to the same amount of radiation contained in a banana. To those who are scanned, the radiation is the same as eating 15 bananas.

“You never reinvent the wheel,” Greene said. “Other agencies have already done this.”

Those agencies have seen success, he said.

Jails in Hamilton, Cuyahoga, Stark and Medina counties in Ohio currently use the scanners.

OD Security North America LLC of College Station, Texas, manufactures the scanner, for which the county took on $118,000 in debt to purchase.