FARMINGTON, Utah (AP) - Several months ago, Davis County Deputy Chief Kevin Fielding met with a representative from a nearby school who expressed concerns about being so close to the county jail.
Fielding, who oversees all operations at the jail, took the concern in stride.
“Come on,” he told her, “let me show you our facility.”
After meeting a young lady who was an inmate in the prison and speaking with her briefly, the woman from the school seemed visibly shaken.
“She could hardly even talk to me,” Fielding said.
After some prompting, the woman choked out: “She seemed so normal.”
Fielding earned a hearty laugh with that anecdote as he shared it Feb. 26 with county jail volunteers, an audience familiar with inmates and able to compare public perception to what they see on a weekly basis.
Fielding was encouraging volunteers, attending their annual training session at the Davis County Justice Center, to remember precisely who their service was being rendered to.
“The vast majority (of inmates) are pretty decent people, and they want these programs,” Fielding said. “Most of them just made a couple mistakes.”
More than 150 volunteers attended the meeting, receiving both praise for their work with prisoners and training for the coming year. Others will attend their mandatory training later this week; in all, 216 people volunteer at the jail, excluding contracted employees. Volunteers largely consist of religious instructors, substance abuse prevention supervisors and education counselors.
“These programs really do reduce recidivism,” said Deputy Scott Manfull, who supervises each of the programs, noting Davis County holds more such activities than any other jail in the state.
“Every (program) I’ve asked for, I’ve got,” Manfull told those gathered. “That’s because of you guys and I really appreciate it.”
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now offering a family history indexing course at the jail in addition to its typical ministry work there. Instructors ask inmates to sift through records up to hundreds of years old and determine names as part of the religion’s genealogy work.
The LDS Church proposed the unique program to the Utah Sheriff’s Association in 2012 and worked to provide laptops and other equipment. Fielding said a large concern was restricting live internet access to the genealogy records themselves, and that the classes took off in 2013 after that security precaution was finalized.
2,255 names were catalogued by Davis County inmates in 2013, and 174,939 were completed throughout the state. The LDS Church said it expects that figure to balloon to about 2 million statewide in 2014.
The volunteer couple for the indexing course in Davis County, Brent and Chris, asked that their last name be withheld for security purposes. They have been working on indexing with inmates since August in once per week sessions of no more than 90 minutes. They typically have between six and 12 students attend the sessions; no more than sixteen inmates are allowed in one classroom at a time.
“We emphasize to them that they’re doing a service, that anybody can access the names” once they’re catalogued, Chris said. “There are several of them that really get into it. It breaks up the monotony.”
Records from the United States or Great Britain are typically used, but the names have not been restricted to English speaking countries. Inmates work hard to decipher some Spanish and Italian spellings, and the very oldest English records are also difficult to work through, Brent said.
“With some of this Old English you get to where you don’t recognize some of the letters,” he said. “Some are very hard to read.”
Kane County inmates indexed the majority of genealogical names in Utah during 2013, completing 138,147. Inmates at Weber County’s jail and work release locations indexed a combined 6,115 in that time.
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Information from: Standard-Examiner, https://www.standard.net
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