A potentially life-saving piece of equipment may soon be within reach for the Pulaski County Sheriff’s Department. Sheriff Jeff Richwine told the county commissioners Monday that he recently learned about grant opportunities from the USDA for equipment purchases. He hopes to possibly use some of that funding to get a body scanner for the jail.
“Several of the bigger sheriff’s offices have them,” he told the commissioners. “They’re expensive pieces of equipment, but they’re pretty important, as far as – you’ve seen some of these jail deaths, where people are coming in with swallowing things. This is a machine that scans that, and you can see if they’ve got something in their stomach hidden somewhere, that you can get them to the hospital, because what happens, that stuff breaks and nobody knows they O.D. and then you have a jail death.”
Richwine said the potential availability of grant funds coincides with a decrease in prices for the body scanners. The commissioners voiced no objection with Richwine continuing to look into the grant opportunity.
