Vermilion Parish Sheriff's Office makes changes to jail to prevent future prison escapes

The Vermilion Parish Sheriff’s Office is making changes at the parish jail to correct things that occurred, which allowed Christopher Dyson to escape from the jail this Saturday.
After four days on the run, Dyson turned himself in to the Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday.
He was a trustee at the jail awaiting trial for a drug charge.
Last Saturday morning, Dyson figured out a way to escape from prison by jumping on top of a metallic building in the back and then jumping over the 10-foot high fence.
This was not the first time an inmate has climbed the fence to escape at the parish jail. The last inmate to escape the fenced perimeter of the jail was in 2005.
The video shows Dyson left the prison yard at around 10 a.m. but was not noticed missing until 11 a.m. The siren, which was installed to alert the neighbors when a prisoner escapes, was not sounded until 12:23 p.m, almost three hours after he escaped and an hour and 20 minutes after the personnel in the prison realized he was missing.
Neighbors who live within a two-mile radius of the prison said they heard the siren sound, but were not 100 percent sure it was an escaped prisoner or just a test siren that is sounded every day by the prison at noon.
“I did not know anything until I saw it on the news that night,” said a female. “I saw sheriff cars riding around, but no one stopped to tell us. Someone should have told me. I am glad my husband was here Saturday.”
Another neighbor said he read about who escaped on the Internet and then proceeded to load his shotgun just in case he was going to have an unwanted visitor.
The late sounding siren; the prisoner being able to go 60 minutes without being discovered missing; the way Dyson was able to climb a building and leap over a fence are things Sheriff Mike Couvillon, Col. Kirk Frith, who is in charge of running the prison, and other Sheriff’s deputies who help operate the jail, have already addressed the issues and come up with solutions to remedy the problems.
The wheel has already begun rolling to get changes made in the prison in order to correct the problems that occurred Saturday morning.

• The way the prisoner escaped

The police jury, which owns the jail and the buildings on the property, sent an architect Monday to look into making changes to stop prisoners from escaping at the area where the last two have escaped from.
Frith said the police jury is looking into moving back the fence away from the buildings that are in the prison. When the prison was built in 1981, the fence was a distance from the original building because there was no metallic building in the prison yard.
Another change coming is having razor wire on the top of the 10-foot fence that surrounds the jail. Right now, razor wire and barbed wire are on top of the fence. Where Dyson escaped, he leaped over barbed wire.
Frith said the police jury has already ordered rolls of razor wire to be placed on the fence.
According Frith, parish government (police jury) is responsible for the maintenance of the parish jail, to include the fencing perimeter issues, not the Sheriff. Frith also said that although these fencing deficiencies have been long standing, the Police Jury seemed very eager and more than willing to correct these issues this time, a testament to the commitment to public safety that we all share.

• Siren sounds hours after prisoner escaped

The siren was added to the jail four years ago because a neighbor near the jail wanted some way to be alerted if a prisoner escaped. The police jury purchased the siren. Every day at noon the siren is tested to make sure it works.
The first time a prisoner escaped, the siren was sounded a couple hours after he escaped. Why?
Frith did not give an excuse other than to say his deputies become very busy with this type of emergency as it necessitates a lot of things and although the sounding of the alarm is mandated early on in these procedures, he can only offer that human error occurred, and his deputies forgot. When it was sounded, it was sounded nine times. He said people may have become confused because it was sounded 30 minutes after the noon test.
Now, Frith said, the new procedure in place is that the siren will blow 10 times every hour for the first three hours of an incident at the jail. That way, he said, there will not be confusion. He also reiterated that deputies will follow policy and sound the siren at the onset, as current policy requires when and as soon as a possible escape is in question, rather than waiting to confirm one. Frith also said that a mandatory “full mock training” of an escape will be done every year to help deputies stay familiar with these type emergencies and the response to it, emergencies that do not occur regularly.

• Neighbors complain they knew nothing

In the future, residents who live in a three-mile area of the jail will know instantly when a prisoner escapes.
In the next couple of weeks, residents, who live around the jail, will get a letter from the Sheriff’s Office asking residents for their home and cell phone number. He said the Sheriff’s Office will use an automated call system to call residents who live around the jail. The phone call will advise the residents of a jail escape or related jail emergency and to take necessary safety precautions with follow up call providing further updates as needed.

• Improvements make for a more secure prison

Frith said because of the escape, he and his staff are completing a comprehensive post escape review, ordered by the Sheriff that will examine all response efforts from the onset to the capture that will define deficiencies to ultimately allow improvements across every area of responding to these type emergencies in the future, including both operations of response inside the prison, as well as physical improvements outside the prison.
Frith did not want to give details of what changes were made regarding security procedures because of the sensitive nature of such.
“The post reviews of this incident will improve the operations of the jail,” Frith said. “And it will improve the notifications process to the public. The post incident reviews will have some benefits across the board. It is our job and the public expects us to improve the Sheriff’s Office at every interval and opportunity that we can.”