County staff may face drug scans

Sheriff aims to better search detention officers

When Maricopa County Sheriff Paul Penzone said he would require detention officers to go through security scanners on their way to work, he did so at a high-profile news conference.

During a recent budget discussion with the Board of Supervisors, he spoke at length about the plan. Both presentations came in response to the arrest of a detention officer who attempted to carry drugs into one of the county’s five jails, and after scores of people in county lock-ups were hospitalized with fentanyl overdoses last year.

“This is a legacy moment for the Maricopa County Sheriff ’s Office,” Penzone said. “I do it with the number one priority of protecting the lives of not only inmates, but our employees.”

His office will purchase at least seven body scanners and seven conveyor scanners through an expedited purchasing process so that operators can check over detention officers, attorneys, volunteers and others who go in and out of the county’s jail system each day, officials said. The Secure Technology Value Solutions scanners will join different body scanner models already used in parts of the county’s jail system to screen incarcerated people. Sheriff ’s office officials aim to have the new machines up and running by August.

The move to scan employees is largely unprecedented in Arizona. It remains to be seen how efficient the scanners might be in stemming what county officials describe as a flood of fentanyl entering the county’s detention facilities.

What is clear is the cost. Penzone has requested $5.7 million from county supervisors to fund the scanners for the upcoming fiscal year, a number he called “aggressive” and potentially an overestimate.

Officials say the existing costs of the machines can be covered by the surplus in the sheriff ’s office’s current budget before the fiscal year ends in June. It will come from the organization’s detention fund, which provides money for operating the county jail system.

But going forward, Penzone’s office will need to figure out how to hire and pay about 40 security officers to operate the scanners at a cost of $3 million annually. The jail system is already understaffed, he told The Arizona Republic, so he can’t take detention officers away from their current duties to do it themselves. And, he said, prefers to keep lines between officers and those watchdogging them.

“That may be a new field for us to recruit from,” he said. “Secondarily, I

Sheriff’s office officials aim to have the new machines up and running by August.

just think that you have to have concise, clear lines of responsibility. If I take a detention officer out of their current role right now with their peer group ... dynamically, it’s really difficult.”

Penzone told county supervisors that he knows the expense is large. But while a majority of his detention officers do their jobs well and want to protect public safety, he said, “there’s always the rotten apple in the bunch.”

And the upfront cost of the scanners could help prevent the county from facing costly lawsuits, in addition to saving lives. The sheriff ’s office saw almost 20 overdose deaths in its jails last year, Penzone said.

“This is a very extreme reaction on my part to say that I want scanners at every point of entry so anyone coming into the jails is checked,” he said.

Drugs in the jails

Although the sheriff ’s office has never put its employees through body scanners before, it has done other checks on detention officers, said Deputy Chief Jesse Spurgin, who oversees custody operations at the sheriff’s office’s Fourth Avenue and Towers jails and has helped internally to lead the project to install scanners for employees.

For instance, detention officers have sometimes been asked to remove their jackets or open lunch boxes while entering the jails in which they work. But those efforts largely stopped amid health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Currently, officers are required to bring in clear backpacks so that others can see what they are carrying with them into the jail, Spurgin said.

“There have been times in the past where we’ve mandated employee searches, but it’s not been like this,” he said. “We have not patted any of our employees down, nothing to that degree.”

And while scanning detention officers is new, putting incarcerated people through scanners isn’t.

The sheriff ’s office has four body scanners and several conveyer scanners in use throughout the jail system. Penzone pointed to fentanyl found on inmates going through the booking process as proof that they work in conjunction with other tactics, such as hand searches, to scope out drugs.

“They’re part and parcel,” he told The Republic. “If we don’t have scanners, then there’s a way for inmates to conceal contraband that maybe we’re not going to be able to identify . ... If you know you’re going through an X-ray machine, then there’s certain things you’re not going to carry or you’re going to try to conceal them differently because you know the X-ray machine may identify them.”

The body scanners in the jail system are similar to those used in TSA lines.

They use millimeter radio waves to produce black-and-white images of the people being scanned. The machines’ software analyzes the images and highlights potential contraband, allowing detention officers to find it.

“It produces less radiation than what your cellphone does,” Spurgin said.

Over the course of a few days in February, sheriff’s office officials said they seized roughly 500 fentanyl pills from incarcerated people going through the booking process. The sheriff ’s office announced Monday it seized an additional 200 pills last week.

And the agency isn’t the only law enforcement entity seeing success with scanners used on detained people. In Pima County, where officials have been putting incarcerated people through ADANI scanners since 2018, detention officers have nearly doubled the amount of contraband that they confiscate. That statistic includes, but isn’t limited to, drugs such as fentanyl.

How the new scanners will work

The scanners currently used on those incarcerated in Maricopa County’s jails are not in locations that would allow them to also be used on detention officers, sheriff ’s office officials said. Functionally, they wouldn’t be able to get their employees through those machines fast enough.

Even if it were possible, Penzone said he wouldn’t want to use the same machines on his officers.

“I’m not saying we mistreat anybody, but we’re not going to send an employee through the same place we send an inmate because optically, I just feel that’s disrespectful to the fact that they’re responsible for the inmates and that environment,” Penzone said. “They have their own designated areas, and I want to respect that space and have them go through that space.”

The new scanners, like those used on incarcerated people in the jails, will use millimeter wave technology. But Secure Technology Value Solutions specifically designs its machines for a correctional setting, so the new scanners will allow detention officers to keep their shoes on, hastening the process of getting people through the machines before their shifts begin. And they will produce avatars of the officers with potential contraband highlighted rather than showing a fullbody image, alleviating any privacy concerns, Spurgin said.

So far, detention officers haven’t outright battled the move, he said.

“There was an initial concern of distrust, which we’ve been able to address and I think we’ve addressed it very well,” Spurgin said. “This is not a level of distrust. It’s a fact that we are dealing with an unprecedented surge in fentanyl overdoses that we’ve never seen before . ... We want to make sure we’re doing everything we can to combat that, not just for the safety of our inmates, but for the safety of our staff and our visitors as well. When you explain it to them in that sense, it’s really reduced that pushback.”

Penzone said he’s convinced that the extra screening needs to happen, regardless of whether it’s a popular move among his workforce. And he wanted to announce it even before he had the machines to ensure everybody — detention officers, other county officials and the public — knows he’s taking drugs in the jails seriously.

“I don’t like bureaucracy,” he said. “And I wanted to make sure that my colleagues, as well the community, knew where I stood on this and why I felt it was important. For my staff, they needed to hear from me right away that this wasn’t going to be tolerated.”

Fears over liability for inmate deaths

Penzone told county supervisors that he’s worried about the safety of the incarcerated population and his employees. But he acknowledged that there’s also a practical reason to invest in keeping narcotics out of the jail cells — money.

When somebody dies in the county jails, the sheriff ’s office and other county departments potentially can be held liable, he said.

“We can’t stand by any more and go, ‘Well, that’s the cost of doing business. It happens,’” he said. “No, if there’s a way for us to mitigate that, then we have to weigh the cost of the mitigation against the cost of a life . ... We’re trying to be as cost-efficient as possible, but I don’t ever want to see the day when an employee of ours jeopardized the life or cost the life of an inmate or a colleague because we didn’t take every step possible to keep good people good.”

Officials said Maricopa County has not had to pay out any legal settlements in the past three years related to overdoses in the jails. But that’s not because they haven’t been sued.

A case filed last year against the sheriff ’s office claims officials’ failure to maintain a drug-free jail environment led to the death of Gunther Erich Herrmann III, a 53-year-old man who was found unresponsive in his jail cell in June 2021 from an apparent drug overdose. Correctional officers found him during a routine check and tried to revive him but were too late.

His death came just three days after he was arrested on drug-related charges. An autopsy found that Herrmann died from a combination of fentanyl, methamphetamine and heroin that he accessed while behind bars.

The lawsuit, filed by Herrmann’s parents and two surviving children, is ongoing. Cases involving the deaths of incarcerated people often move slowly through the legal system, officials said. They can take years to be resolved.

But once a settlement is reached, the cost to taxpayers can be in the millions. Wrongful death cases under former County Sheriff Joe Arpaio led to a long line of high-dollar payouts, including a $1.1 million dollar check to the family of a woman who died while experiencing drug withdrawal. The woman had been arrested just days before on suspicion of stealing $350 worth of scrap metal in Phoenix, a misdemeanor.

And Herrmann is far from the only person to die of drug use while under Penzone’s watch. Nearly 180 incarcerated people were taken to the hospital in 2022 for overdoses, and 17 in-custody deaths have been linked to drugs, Penzone said while announcing his scanner plan.

Ahead of a trend?

Penzone couldn’t name any other law enforcement agencies in Arizona that already were putting their detention officers through a TSA-style security check at the top of their shifts, although he said the Arizona Department of Corrections is considering the move. The state agency did not confirm its interest in bringing in the machines.

Nationwide, Spurgin said the practice is relatively rare. It requires an investment and a great deal of planning, and it generally isn’t a popular idea among employees.

The scanner model that will be used by the sheriff’s office is only in operation in a handful of other jurisdictions, he said, including the St. Martin’s Parish Sheriff ’s Office in Louisiana and the Delaware Department of Corrections.

Lt. Fred Renz with the St. Martin’s Parish Sheriff ’s Office said the machines have worked out great for his agency, which primarily uses them to scan incarcerated people returning from work details outside the parish’s jail and newly booked detainees.

Since installing them, he said, detention officers have seen a “dry spell” in people trying to bring narcotics, weapons and other contraband into the jail.

“The guys who did go out on our work detail were kind of scared to even try to bring something in because of the technology,” Renz said. “The first guy we ran through, we found contraband he had swallowed in the scan. We put him in what we call a dry room, excavated it from his body and were able to keep that from actually going into the facility.”

Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office officials expect that as fentanyl becomes more common on the street, more agencies may begin screening employees to guard against it in jail cells. That gives the sheriff’s office the ability to be a trendsetter if the machines prove to save lives.

“The way it stands, across the country, this is not a common thing,” Spurgin said. “That could particularly change if different jurisdictions are seeing the same kind of concerns that we are, with drugs coming into the facility, but right now it’s very limited use on visitors and employees.”