Think twice before you cross the line!

Wooden doors and direct supervision is how the Orient Road Jail works in Hillsborough County today. This might not sound too bad comparing to what we are use to see on the movie screen, but once you enter those doors you records are in the system.

Unfortunately, I missed the trip to the Orient Road Jail and I watched the video from the tour that was recorded last semester. The tour was given by Lt. Scott Smith who is a shift commander at the jail. According to him the jail system have done beyond from what it used to be 20 years ago. Wooden doors replaced the old linear system and direct supervision became the way inmates are controlled.


An interesting fact for Orient Road jail is that they are the only booking facility for 27 arresting agencies in Hillsborough County. There the inmates stay for four to six hours before they are moved to intake housing. If they get booked before midnight, they will see the judge at first appeal court in the morning. If the inmates are booked after midnight, they have to wait for 24 hours before they appear in front the judge. Inmates can leave the court if they pay their bonds, but if the bond is for a large amount of money the people who pay the bond need to prove the legal ownership that money. This is a precaution taken from the judge.

Usually 200 inmates are booked every day at Hillsborough County Jail. Finger prints, incident reports, medical exams, mug shots, video footage, and phone calls are all public records. Some of those records can be web accessed at: http://www.hcso.tampa.fl.us/PublicInquiry/ArrestInquiry.

According to Lt. Smith the jail’s capacity is 1700 inmates, but at that time they had only 999 inmates in their seven housing units. The average jail time for most of them is 19 days, but it can go to a year or even more. Some inmates go and comeback and their records still remain in the jail’s record system. Usually one deputy is assigned to 72 inmates in a pod, but in confine cells there are 3 deputies in a pod of 64 inmates.

Last but not least, the visitations to the inmates are now done through video recording, which are also public records along with the monitoring calls that each inmate makes.

Criminal records are something that can hunt you down all the way through life, so think twise before you cross the door of Hillsborough County Jail’s doors.