Thirty-year-old Mason Tyler Simon lived for less than four days after he was arrested and placed in Guadalupe County Jail in Seguin, Texas. He used a t-shirt to commit suicide by hanging and died on April 4, 2022.

How to Conduct a Proper Cell Check

To ensure proper cell checks, the following should be part of every face-to-face observation:

• For each inmate, verify that there is a sign of life, such as the rising and falling of their chest while breathing. If a round of cell checks is treated as a race, it is doubtful that this step can be properly addressed. Make notes about specifics, such as whether an inmate was lying on their left or right side, movement was observed, or whether they were facing the wall.
• It is helpful to require jailers to use two or three adjectives or verbs to log face-to-face observations of high-risk inmates. The notes should be descriptive and not general, such as “sleeping” or “all is fine.”
• Make sure that cell checks and security rounds are conducted at staggered times. Although the maximum time frame may be 15 minutes, the timing of the cell check should be clearly random. If every cell check is made at the 11-minute mark, for instance, the randomization is not effective.

Learn more in Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of this series.

This website never purposes to imply that a person or institution has been engaged in misdeeds. Helping inmates in Texas county jails by providing helpful resources is the purpose of each post on this site.

–Guest Contributor