The company maintains the equipment and returns a portion of the revenue generated to the county’s general fund.
From 2013-2015, the county received just over $1.3 million from CPC.
Last week, a court hearing on a motion to dismiss charges for the man charged in the beating death of a Madison Twp. toddler shed light on phone system issues at the jail.
Attorneys for Bradley Young, who is charged with murder, involuntary manslaughter and felony child endangering in the beating death of 3-year-old Kinsley Kinner, were arguing to have all those charges dropped because they claimed detectives listened to attorney-client privileged calls Young made from the jail.
The phone number posted for such privileged conversations from being recorded did not work. The phone number is to a former call center that a CPC official estimated has not been used since 2006.
That notice has been updated with the proper number, according to Butler County Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer.
“When this came to light, we made changes,” he said.
The Journal-News dialed that number on Friday afternoon and was told an attorney could begin the verification process by the person who answered the phone.
Cleveland-based attorney Ian Friedman who is an adjunct professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, said he is hopeful the issues pinpointed in the Young case will shine a light on the need for jails to assure attorney client privilege in phone calls.
“It may not be an important issue to some people. But there is a presumption of innocence and they absolute need for access to their attorney,” he said, adding it is common practice in most jails and prisons to record calls and for law enforcement to be told not listen to them if they are between a defendant and his attorney.
“Attorney client calls are always protected, period,” Friedman said.
Still, defense attorneys recently told this news outlet that they remind their clients to not discuss their case over the phone.
Defense attorney David Washington said last month that he spends hours each week at the Butler County Jail visiting clients in person, rather than talking to them over the phone.
RELATED: Attorneys say they take precautions with calls received from jail
Dwyer said if an inmate informs a corrections officer that they want to call their attorney, arrangements can be made to place the call from a non-recorded line.
“But we have to take precautions with it. We have to verify it is a legitimate call to an attorney,” Dwyer said, noting multiple, frequent calls are sometimes not welcome by the attorneys.
“And there’s always people around, inmates and others, in the jail who can hear what is said, whether the call is recorded or not,” he said. “So it rare that we get the requests.”
Telephone calls are recorded for security purposes at the jail, both Dwyer and Jail Warden Capt. Dennis Adams told this news outlet.
Most often the recordings are done to assure the safety of an inmate who may be suicidal or who is violent; and to thwart efforts of contraband being smuggled into the facility.
The four phones in question at the Young hearing are mounted on poles at the jail’s booking desk. They are intended for free use by people being booked in the jail to call family or to make arrangements for bail.
The calls made from those phones are recorded, as are all inmate phones throughout the jail, but sheriff’s office officials said until the Young case they were unaware a “marker” — which is the message stating the call may be recorded — was not attached to the phone line.
Young, who was kept in isolation in a cell just outside the booking area for weeks, used those phones to call his attorney, among others, he said.
The phones not having a “marker” was an error by CPC when they installed the phones, according to Dwyer.
“We didn’t know because they are inmate phones. Nobody on staff was picking it up and using it. And you know what, no inmate ever told us there was no marker,” Dwyer said.
Richard Pryor, of CPC, confirmed during testimony at Young’s hearing last week that the “marker” didn’t play from the four phones due to the company sending the calls through a different router.
Dwyer said the four phones are now routed through the system with the warning “marker,” but calls on inmate jail phones continue to be recorded.
About the Author
