During my courthouse site assessments, the security personnel who accompany me often tell me that the facility used for unloading and loading transport vehicles at the prisoner entrance can be the weakest link in the chain of prisoner movements.

Moving a prisoner from the entrance to the...

Although unnerving, I often meet up with prisoners (in-custody defendants) face-to-face while waiting for an elevator in courthouses. Typically, when this happens, the elevator doors open, and I am directed by court security personnel to step aside while the prisoners are escorted out of the...

Today, in the fourth installment in my eight-part series on quantitative measures used in courthouse planning, I am exploring the criterion of courthouse security– the security features in the courthouse, including secured and restricted circulation patterns, prisoner holding areas, and sallyports.

In my previous post about courthouse mailrooms, I reviewed standards for central mailrooms in new court facilities. In this article, I will suggest how an upgraded courthouse mailroom might be done in an existing courthouse.

After the terrorist attacks of September 2001 and the anthrax contamination occurrences in federal mail-handling facilities in October 2001, the federal courts developed a new approach to achieve more rigorously controlled mailrooms. This enhanced approach was based on the central premise that all...