MACCLENNY, Fla. – The suicide of Ariel Castro, the Cleveland man who kidnapped, raped and held three women captive, has a lot of people talking and wondering how it could happen.
Baker County Correctional Center watches its inmates for suicidal behavior, and Sheriff Joey Dobson spoke Wednesday about how officers work to keep jail suicides from happening.
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Dobson said it doesn't matter how bad the crime is, his job is to protect the people he has in custody. He didn't want to speculate about what happened with Castro because it's still under investigation, but he did show Channel 4 what his officers do in his jail.
"This would certainly bring light to our staff today because this happened somewhere else," Dobson said. "We'll certainly relook at everything we do. This is a good point to make sure that we're following all the procedures and guidelines that we have."
Dobson said his corrections deputies are trained to look for odd or suicidal behavior with every one of their inmates. He said deputies and nurses evaluate every person who goes into the jail, and they watch over them until they leave.
"This staff that works here during the day and night, if they see something or behavior that might appear to be suicidal, they take extra precautions, and that mental health person will be brought in immediately," Dobson said.
Major John Finley is in charge of Baker County corrections.
"What we try to do is be proactive and be able to identify people that are a suicide risk," he said.
Deputies say when they do have an inmate about whom they're worried may try to hurt themselves, they put the inmate in rooms in which the walls are padded and there's a special mattress and blanket inside. The blanket can't be torn or tied, and deputies say nobody can try to hang themselves. They said the inmates wear a "suicide smock."
The sheriff and Finley say they check on the inmates at least every 15 minutes because they don't want anything like what happened with Castro in Ohio to happen in their jail.
"If the situation warrants, then we would actually have a corrections deputy sitting outside of this cell with constant observation on the individual," Finley said.
He said the procedures have seemed to work so far, as they haven't had an inmate commit suicide since the 1980s. But deputies say they'll always keep working to make sure they're doing the best job possible.