What are the Procedures to Enter Belize Central Prison?  

Yesterday, we reported on an incident at Belize Central Prison involving attorney Leslie Mendez, who was asked to surrender documents for inspection upon entry. Mendez, citing attorney-client privilege, declined to hand over the confidential documents. After a discussion, a compromise was reached between Mendez and the prison security team. Today, we visited the prison to learn what the procedures of that protocol look like. Here’s Michael Gladden, Chief Security Officer at the Belize Central Prison with more information.

 

Michael Gladden, Chief Security Officer, Belize Central Prison

“When it comes to regular visit, after going through the process of finding out who you’re coming to see, then you would go, and that’s the visiting processing area, you would go to the baggage search or for attorneys, if they have any kind of documentation. When it comes to attaches, briefcases, or anything large like that’s not allowed in the prison, right? Being that it would be a lot for our officers to go through. So what we ask is that they bring a manila folder, any kind of writing pad, any kind of documents and things like that and then those items, as well as any visitors, must be perused. And the perusal is, especially when it comes to attorney and clients, it’s pretty much just skimming through it. It’s pretty much taking the document, and I’ll show you in a little while how we go through that procedure. And it’s not reading it, because we know the client privilege is very sensitive. So what it is just perusing and looking through that document, ensuring there’s no contraband within. And this goes for all visitors. And talk to me about how you navigate or avoid the people conducting the searches, stumbling or accidentally reading something that’s confidential. That would be hard to do because it’s not a point of where you actually go and stop and look at each document. It’s basically just flipping through the documents one by one with that person in front of you monitoring what you’re doing.”

 

Britney Gordon

“What exactly are you looking for within papers specifically?”

 

Michael Gladden

“It could be anything. We’ve had instances where we found cash within papers.  That’s not authorized. We have a procedure for that to happen. So we’re looking for cash. We’re looking for any kind of unauthorized item. It could be from anything. It could be from cash. It could be a personal note that’s not authorized. It could be maybe a letter from a family member that we have a procedure for that to go through as well.”