BEYOND THE MYTHS: The Jail in Your Community

Beyond the Myths:  The Jail In Your Community provides a foundation for the efforts of sheriff's and jail administrators to inform the public about jails generally, their jails specifically, and the need for community interest in and discussion about their own local jail.  The video may also be useful in educating prospective jail employees about local detention.

One of the challenges of producing this video was the diversity among the more than 3000 local jails in the United States.  Every effort has been made to provide information about local jails that is applicable across the country.  There may be a few instances, however, where information in the video is not completely accurate for every jail.  For example, the video says that misdemeanants are sentenced to local jails, while felons are sentenced to state and federal prisons.  That, for the most part, is true, but in some local jurisdictions, certain types of sentenced felons do serve their sentences in jails.  Jail officials should clarify such points with the groups to whom they are showing this video.

The National Institute of Corrections hopes all viewers will find this informative and helpful.

The San Diego Sheriff's Department believes that this is an excellent video produced by the National Institute of Corrections!  It gives the viewers a sound basis to begin the understanding about the jail in their community.  Jails are often misunderstood and often confused with prisons.  This video helps to address that misunderstanding and the confusion.  We hope you will take the time to view it.

This video was originally produced on VHS tape by the National Institute of Corrections (NIC) and is available on VHS tape to official organizations from NIC.  It was converted to the Microsoft "wms" format by the San Diego Sheriff's Department's Data Services Division with the permission of the NIC.  The San Diego County Sheriff's Department hopes that the wms format will offer a broader distribution of this excellent video.

The video is available in the wms format in two general ways.  The first is a large complete file, which is about 48 megabytes in size.  For this large file, it is suggested that only high-speed internet connections be used for the download.  Dial-up connections could take an extremely long time to download the whole file.

The second method was to break the video into nine segments.  Each segment transitions into the next chapter.  The segments vary from 3 to 12 megabytes in size and might serve the non-high speed or dial-up viewers better than one very large file. This format also allows high speed users to see several minute segments rather than to download the entire file.

It is recommended that you have the latest version of the Windows media player from Microsoft.  Older versions have been know to play only the audio of this file.

NIC has a large volume of other information for you.  You can connect to their web site at:   http://www.nicic.org.

10/08/2003