Apr 22, 2016 4 min read

WAYNESBURG – Harry Gillispie smiled as he pointed to the new wiring installed atop the Greene County jail’s perimeter fence carrying more than 7,000 volts of electricity and posed a rhetorical question to anyone thinking about escaping.

“Would you want to cross it?” he said Thursday while showing off the security enhancement to a reporter.

The electric cables installed just below the razor wiring were energized April 7, making the Greene County jail the first county-run lockup facility in the state to use an electric fence to keep prisoners from escaping.

The security upgrade comes less than four months after Waylon Hanlan Jr. cut through a tent-like shelter holding minimum-security inmates, scaled a fence, threw a blanket over the barbed wiring and dashed to temporary freedom Dec. 27. State police arrested him in his hometown of Dunkard Township two days later. Hanlan, who only had a few months left on his previous sentence before the escape, has since pleaded guilty and was sentenced to three-to-six years in state prison.

Two other inmates, including one man awaiting trial for murder, escaped from the jail for about two hours by scaling the fence in June 2013.

Gillispie, the jail warden for the past 20 years, expects the security upgrade to be a deterrent to stop any other inmates contemplating an escape.

“They know it’s there and it’s live,” Gillispie said of the inmates. “The only real comment I’ve heard was that they ‘don’t want anything to do with it.’ That’s good. That’s the whole idea.”

The wires are situated at the top of the fence so no inmates should come in contact with the electrical current unless they’re climbing it. The wiring would deliver a non-lethal jolt of electricity, Gillispie said, and alert the control room where the attempted breach is occurring so the staff can immediately move to that location.

“We’ll be able to know exactly where the attempted breach is,” Gillispie said.

The system can be powered down at any moment for maintenance or in the event of an emergency.

The entire system is being leased from Electric Guard Dog LLC for just under $1,000 a month, meaning the county will pay $11,700 annually over the three-year contract. That’s pennies compared to what Gillispie said he’d have to pay to hire 10 new workers to beef up security.

“The good thing about the fence, it doesn’t get distracted,” Gillispie said. “If there’s a diversion created on one side of the yard, it will still be there in the other (locations) if someone tries to escape. It’s constant all the time. It’s just another tool in the toolbox to keep inmates in.”

When Gillispie began perusing the idea of installing an electric fence earlier this year, he was shocked to learn that no other county jails were using the system. State Department of Corrections spokeswoman Sue McNaughton confirmed that the agency is “not aware” of any other county jails using an electric fence system.

Gillispie is proud that Greene County is at the leading edge of the new technology.

“I’m hoping if other facilities see how we’re using this, and if they want to use it, they can come here and we’d be happy to discuss that,” Gillispie said.

The jail staff is now eyeing other security upgrades.

Gillispie said he hopes to upgrade security cameras at the facility and announced that the DOC is putting together a vulnerability assessment team to investigate any security weaknesses at the jail. He did not know when that team would begin its audit or when the report would be available for review.