Walter Zimmerman
Founding Manager/Executive Director
Melvin Henry Center
6872 Winchester Ave.
Inwood, WV 25428
301.807.5464
wzimmerman@melvinhenry.org
National Center for Construction Education and Research Trainer #7720221

Level I Certified Infra-Red Thermographer #110404
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                 Locked up  
             
 By Ryan Marshall, Times Staff Writer                                                                                            Sunday, June 29, 2008
You don’t just open a door at the Carroll County Detention Center. 

As Lt. Mike Green strolls toward one of the green metal doors, he reaches down and presses the button on his radio.

“Open 302, 3-0-2,” Green calls out.

In the center’s control room, another officer moves his computer’s cursor and clicks on an icon for door 302. A buzzer sounds and the lock on the door clicks open. Green moves through and the door closes with a clang that echoes faintly through the halls.

Green is the compliance officer at the detention center. He’s responsible for making sure the employees and inmates abide by the center’s rules and maintain a safe environment for inmates and staff.

A former naval officer, Green moves around the center with a sense of purpose, pointing out the different sections of the facility. There’s the medical observation room, where staff can monitor prisoners who may be considered suicidal or come into the center under the influence of drugs or alcohol.

The room is about 15 feet by 10 feet, with stainless steel benches lining the walls. Cameras in each corner allow staff members to observe the inmates.

There’s the property room, where inmates’ possessions are collected and stored once they’re processed into the detention center.

There’s K-Pod, where inmates who’ve proven to have discipline problems — by fighting or committing other serious violations of the center’s rules — are confined to their cells 23 hours a day.

There’s the library, where inmates can come once a week to sign out books and magazines to take back to their cells.

There’s the unit that houses up to 10 people who are in the process of being deported. Inmates in the unit usually stay three to four months, and the detention center is reimbursed by the federal government for the cost of housing them.

The cell units, where most of the center’s 230 or so inmates are housed, stretch out along the length of the center’s main corridor. Guards are stationed at intervals along the hallway.
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Lisa Goodman lives in a small room near the area with the cubicles and glass partitions where inmates can receive visitors.

Goodman, 20, is serving a sentence for theft. She’s due to get out sometime in 2009, although she’s not exactly sure when.

Taking advantage of programs at the jail makes the days go by somewhat faster, Goodman said.

Goodman is awaiting the results of her general equivalency diploma exam. She takes classes on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. She goes to the library once a week and to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings on Thursdays. She holds a trustee job, doing housekeeping work in the detention center’s lobby and administrative areas. She’s taken classes on computer skills and parenting — she has a 2-year-old daughter — and said she’s even taken a domestic violence education course, just for something to do.

At her GED classes, Goodman works on setting goals identifying problems in her environment that might keep her from accomplishing them.














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Though Goodman  has been at the detention center since November, she said she’s still not used to being there.

She sometimes struggles with the mental strain of knowing she’s confined by the walls of the center. When she was taken across the street to the courthouse for a hearing recently, she said it was tough knowing she’d have to return to the detention center once it was over.

Done with her class, Goodman waits for the officer who’s escorting her back to have the door to her unit unlocked. When the lock bangs open, he steps into the hallway.

“Male officer, coming back,” he yells, then pauses to give the female inmates in the unit a chance to prepare. The air is slightly musty and carries the faint smell of a high school locker room.

Down the hall, several women sit in chairs gathered around a television, watching a daytime talk show. They glance up to see who’s coming, then go back to watching their show.

When Goodman gets back to her unit, the room is dark and the other woman who lives there is sleeping on a bunk. She’ll find something to do to try and keep herself busy until lunch, Goodman says.

The days for the detention center’s prisoners begin around 6 a.m. when they are awakened for breakfast. At 7:30, when the officer shifts change, the prisoners are counted to make sure everyone is present. They eat lunch at 11:30 a.m., then undergo another shift count when the evening shift comes on at 3:30 p.m. Dinner is served around 4 p.m.

Meals are prepared by inmates in the center’s kitchen and distributed by officers. It costs about $1,700 to provide the food, hygiene products and other essentials to house an inmate for a year, said Warden George Hardinger.

In between, some inmates can spend their days taking part in the variety of programs the center offers, from drug treatment and counseling to job training, educational classes, parenting instruction and Bible study. Others spend their day watching television in their cell block units or sleeping or reading in their cells.
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The detention center tries to encourage inmates to get involved as much as possible, Hardinger said.

Many people seem to believe that all inmates are lazy and shiftless, Hardinger said. But in his experience, most inmates willingly accept trustee positions once they’re available. Trustee positions allow inmates to earn time off their sentence by performing jobs in and around the jail.

Hardinger said about 80 percent of the center’s inmates have substance abuse problems when they arrive.

Once prisoners get the drugs out of their systems, they can begin to deal with the anger issues that often helped land them in jail. Many begin to focus seriously on putting their lives back together, he said.

However, that doesn’t guarantee they won’t be back.

The simple fact of corrections is a large number of the jail’s inmates have been in trouble before and will likely be in trouble again, Hardinger said. He estimated at least 60 percent of inmates have been arrested multiple times.

Still, the staff at the jail tries to get them involved in activities that will teach them skills that might give them an edge they didn’t have before, an edge that could keep them from making the same mistakes again.
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Getting ready for life outside the detention center is the focus of Goodman’s attention. In her GED classes with Zimmerman, she was given a goal-setting form to help her map out her post-jail plans.

The detention center doesn’t have a formal program for helping prisoners transition back to life on the outside but tries to set them up with independent programs, such as with the Health Department for continued drug treatment or an agency to help with job placement, Hardinger said.

Goodman said she wants to focus on getting her life back together and being a positive role model for her daughter.

But her broadest goal once she gets out is to leave the Carroll County Detention Center behind for good.

“I don’t wanna keep coming in and out of these walls.”


She studies with Walter Zimmerman from Carroll Community College’s adult education program. He works with Goodman reviewing women in history who’ve empowered themselves by overcoming their environments, such as C.J. Walker, the daughter of slaves who died as the first black female millionaire.

When Goodman gets out of the detention center, she’ll also have to try to control the environment she finds herself in, Zimmerman said.

Being in jail has opened her eyes to the need to set her life straight, Goodman said.

“I just want a better future, and this isn’t it,” she said.