Dallas County Sheriff Chad Leonard rolled out his department’s new 12-prisoner transport van Tuesday, a Ram Promaster 3500 bought from the Stew Hansen dealership in Urbandale for about $60,000.
“We just picked this up yesterday,” Leonard said. “We’ll be using this one for years to come.”
Dallas County taxpayers spend $40,000 to $50,000 every month to house the jail’s overflow inmates in other counties’ jails, according to sheriff’s figures. The cost was about $450,000 in 2016 to take prisoners to and from county jails in Boone, Story, Guthrie, Jasper and Warren counties.
The new van has three compartments, holding two, four and six prisoners respectively. It replaces one of the department’s two minivans, each able to hold five prisoners, and keeps the prisoner-transport fleet at two vehicles.
“Typically, you don’t want to get more than three with one officer, if they’re all shackled up,” Leonard said, and the new unit will be safer for the transport officers.
“This one will be different because they’re locked down and partitioned,” Leonard said. “If you have somebody causing you an issue here, just can just deal with it here. You don’t have to worry about the 12. If you’ve got them on this side — you see how it’s partitioned — then you’re just dealing with those four.”
The risk of prisoner transportation was made painfully clear in a May 1 incident in Council Bluffs in which a Pottawattamie County Sheriff’s Deputy was shot and killed by an escaping inmate during transport.
“There’s a camera up front so the transport officer can monitor what’s going on in the three compartments before he opens the doors,” Leonard said. “There’s been a lot of assaults on police officers doing transports in the last year. I think there was one recently in Missouri or Kansas and another killing of a transport officer, and you had the Council Bluffs incident.”
The sheriff said the new van will also simplify prisoner segregation. Male and female prisoners must be kept separate during transportation and so must prisoners incarcerated for involvement in the same crime.
“Even if we just did males here, we have a minivan that would probably transport the females if needed,” Leonard said. “Typically, we’ve got more than six males going to court, but if you have to segregate them for any reason — because if you and I do a crime together, and we’re going to court the same day, I’ll be over here, and you’ll be over there, or you’ll come in a different vehicle, that sort of thing.”
Court service days in the Dallas County District Court will still be busy, he said, and transportation needs will continue even after construction of the county’s new law enforcement center in Ortonville.
“Even after it’s built,” Leonard said, “we’ll have the courtroom going in the new building, but that’s for everyday initial appearances. People who have to go to court will still need to be driven in here to the courthouse, so this will be used daily.”
“We’ll be transporting forever,” the sheriff said.
