When you fill out a form to do anything, there is certain information you expect to provide.
Name. Address. Phone number or email. Those are the ways you are identified, how your residency is established and how you can be contacted.
Then there is a next of kin or emergency contact. If something goes wrong, someone knows whom to call.
Your doctor will ask for this information out of an abundance of caution. Your child’s school will request it on not just enrollment forms but for every permission slip. Your employer will ask. The military will, too. You just never know when it will be needed.
It should go without saying that a jail would have it.
Members of the Jail Oversight Board are saying the Allegheny County Jail is not contacting family members when someone in its custody is hospitalized.
Board member Rob Perkins said there is no consistent policy about contacting anyone when an inmate goes to the hospital, whether for an injury or an illness. Instead, decisions are made on a case-by-case basis.
A vote to change that was defeated this month, but Perkins said he expects such a policy will be created by jail leadership rather than through an official recommendation by the board.
That should happen. It is strange such a policy is not already in place, as government tends to thrive on planning for worst-case scenarios.
But is there? Or isn’t there? Allegheny County Common Pleas Court President Judge Susan Evashavik DiLucente said there is a policy. Perkins said it just isn’t enforced, but Evashavik DiLucente said changing that would come with a financial cost.
The issue, the judge said, is the officers needed to provide security if a family member were at the bedside during a hospitalization.
That is a bottom-line answer, but it also falls flat.
If there is a policy, it should be enforced. If it isn’t enforced, can it really be considered a policy?
And if cost is the barrier, that should be addressed directly — not used as a reason to ignore it.
A phone call to tell a spouse or parent a loved one has been hospitalized does not have to be an invitation to come to the hospital.
A phone call does not have to cost a dime. It can, however, be priceless in the peace of mind it offers instead of being kept in the dark.
Not everyone in the jail has been convicted. Most are awaiting trial and are presumed innocent.
But even setting that aside, the people most affected when these calls are not made are not the inmates. They are the loved ones who have done nothing wrong.
The government has a basic obligation to communicate with the people who will feel the consequences of what happens inside.
Allegheny County officials can debate policy language, staffing levels and budgets. Those are real concerns, and they deserve real solutions.
But none of that changes the simplest truth at the center of this issue.
When something goes wrong, someone should pick up the phone.
