Now installed at the Berrien County Jail is a full body scanner, a machine that can detect if someone is hiding an object on their person, no matter where it is.
Berrien County Jail Administrator Celena Herbert tells us the $162,000 piece of equipment was installed in January, and they’ve been using it to check every inmate every time they enter the facility.
“It’s a very quick process,” Herbert said. “It’s been beneficial. So far, we were able to recover a shank-type weapon out of a mattress. We can do big items with this. And they have found some oddities on inmates as well that we’ve recovered after taking them to the bathroom, strip searching them.”
Herbert says the sheriff’s department sought the scanner to prevent deaths caused by drugs smuggled into the jail.
“Obviously, we had some issues in 2023, 2022, some in-custody deaths. A lot of it was drug-related. We can’t see what they’re hiding. Even when we do a strip search, if it’s internal, we can’t see it. So this will help with some of that. A lot of the jails in Michigan are getting these.”
There were 14 jails in the state with such machines when Berrien County bought one.
The jail staff was trained in the use of the scanner when it arrived, being shown examples of things they might see in its scans. Herbert says the machine is more powerful than the scanners used by the TSA.
A $50,000 grant helped the sheriff’s department pay for the scanner.
