The new Greene County jail is expected to open this month. Project Manager Dave Tierney tells The Jonesboro Sun the new jail will be turned over to Greene County Sheriff Dan Langston in the next week or two. The new county jail can hold 488 inmates and Tierney calls the facility “a technological wonder”. The jail is constructed in the shape of a wagon wheel, which will allow for more visibility of the individual pods which will hold inmates. According to Tierney, each pod is a self-contained unit that consists of sleeper cells and a day room. Each of the inmate’s cells is constructed with 3/16 inch steel. The door frames are concrete and the doors are two inches thick. Every cell reportedly will be treated as an individual unit and can be removed, if needed. Each dayroom has video conferencing, which will serve for visitation, reducing face-to-face visitation at the jail. Tierney says transfer of prisoners is expected to take place soon.
Johnathan Reaves is the News Director for KASU Public Radio. As part of an Air Force Family, he moved to Arkansas from Minot, North Dakota in 1986. He was first bitten by the radio bug after he graduated from Gosnell High School in 1992. While working on his undergraduate degree, he worked at KOSE, a small 1,000 watt AM commercial station in Osceola, Arkansas. Upon graduation from Arkansas State University in 1996 with a degree in Radio-Television Broadcast News, he decided that he wanted to stay in radio news. He moved to Stuttgart, Arkansas and worked for East Arkansas Broadcasters as news director and was there for 16 years.