Stephanie Klein-Davis | The Roanoke Times

Sgt. Dallas Nolen is restrained during a training session last month at the Western Virginia Regional Jail. Officer Zane Morris holds a pressure point on Nolen's neck. The new jail's staff of 177 people includes some new corrections officers and some veterans.

Officer Selena Noell checks last month to make sure the batteries work in an electroshock weapon during a training session at the new Western Virginia Regional Jail.

Adrian Gonzalez (left) and Ricardo Islas of Metro Painters of Manassas paint a sliding doorway at the Western Virginia Regional Jail last month.

One of the Western Virginia Regional Jail's cell configurations is two-story with a communal area that has large skylights. "The key to a jail setting is to segregate," said Charlie Poff, the jail's new superintendent.

An open dormitory-style area of the new Western Virginia Regional Jail will be used by trusted inmates and those with less offensive crimes and who show nonaggressive behavior.

Its 605 beds will never be mistaken for those at your local Hilton.

Nevertheless, some people are practically lining up for a mattress at the newly operational Western Virginia Regional Jail.

"Some of my inmates have been hearing about it and they're ready to go," Montgomery County Sheriff Tommy Whitt said last week.

He and his staff will be happy to see them off, too.

And the reason is no mystery.

Whitt's jail is packed to the bursting point -- just like those serving Roanoke and Franklin counties and Salem, who all cooperated to build the new regional facility.

The local jails will remain open to house inmates awaiting sentencing, community service inmates and weekenders. But over the next few weeks, while the final touches are put on the new jail, they'll be shipping off a total of about 550 inmates to the regional facility.

Inmates -- male or female -- who have been sleeping on the floor will have a bunk. It will be a metal panel covered by a plastic-coated mattress, but it will be an improvement.

They'll have new plumbing -- an environmentally friendly vacuum-assisted system that, coincidentally, is difficult to abuse by stopping it up or running it nonstop.

They'll get a taste of the sun, even if they're not directly in its glow, through the huge overhead skylights.

And they won't have someone bumping into them or stepping over them just to get from one side of the room to another.

Other aspects of their new digs are likely not to be as attractive to the residents.

The facility is a maze of 1,100 doors and locks, all computer controlled, and almost every square inch of space is visible to jail officers either directly or through one of 186 cameras.

There will be few trips outside the jail. An in-house medical complex will be able to handle everything from colds to stitches, X-rays to isolation, dentistry to dialysis.

Visitation with family and friends will be via video-conferencing -- no more face-to-face through three-quarter-inch bulletproof glass.

Those who designed and operate the jail, however, say all that security is good for staff, good for inmates and good for the taxpaying public.

"The whole thing is about safety and security," Salem Sheriff Ric Atkins said. "It's a dangerous business when you take inmates out of jails into the community for whatever reason."

The most recent reminder of that was William Morva's escape from custody when he was taken to Montgomery Regional Hospital for treatment in August 2006. He bludgeoned a sheriff's deputy, took his gun and killed an unarmed security guard. The next day he killed a Montgomery County sheriff's corporal who was searching for him.

Morva is now on Virginia's death row.

Reducing overcrowding also is "a matter of stability for the facility," Whitt said. His jail, originally rated for 60 inmates, now has an average daily population between 174 and 180. An additional 30 to 40 are housed in other jails.

His staff is so overburdened "it's hard to run programs, hard to get to the library, hard to get to recreation, hard going back and forth for medical care. They're always moving people through people or over people to get anything done.

"It's not a good environment."

He and the other sheriffs are also quick to point out that they expect substantial cost savings over time by using the regional jail -- even though their localities will be paying off $74 million of the facility's total $122 million cost.

First of all, Roanoke County Sheriff Gerald Holt said, there was the 50 percent state match for the actual construction costs that was only available if three or more localities joined forces. Going it alone would have drawn only a 25 percent match.

Second, the new jail is designed so that it can operate with a smaller staff than traditionally designed lock-ups. Holt, who is also chairman of the authority that operates the regional jail, said a substantial savings in operating costs -- as much as $30 million -- is expected over the 30-year term of the bonds sold to finance it.

Finally, each sheriff's office anticipates significant manpower savings by having the most labor-intensive inmates taken care of at the regional jail. That includes the chronically ill and those needing the highest level of security.

Franklin County, for instance, has a jail built in 1937 and rated for 49 prisoners. Sheriff Ewell Hunt, however, is responsible for about 200 inmates -- scattered in 12 facilities.

It requires the equivalent of two full-time positions just to transport prisoners, Hunt said.

His jail also has no accommodations for female inmates, so they all have to be transported elsewhere.

The regional jail staff now will provide all transport between that facility and each of the member localities' jails.

The new jail is "rated" for the 605 beds, a state Department of Corrections standard that isn't the actual maximum allowable population. It also has 200 cells for double bunks, bringing capacity to 805, and could conceivably handle even more than that.

Should the number of inmates continue to grow, or if another locality joins the jail, the building is designed so that additions to accommodate an additional 650 inmates could be built without disrupting jail operations.

Having inmates begin to move into the new jail, "is actually going to be a dream come true for me and my staff," said Holt, whose office oversees the Roanoke County-Salem jail.

It was a dream that occasionally turned nightmarish as negotiations progressed.

An estimated 500 people attended a raucous public meeting at the Salem Civic Center in December 2004 after the county announced that the preferred site for the new jail was a 43-acre tract on the Roanoke River near Dixie Caverns.

The uproar led the Roanoke County Board of Supervisors to reconsider potential sites, but in May 2005, four of the five supervisors agreed to option the property.

Catawba District Supervisor Butch Church, while acknowledging the need for more jail space, voted against the location and protested the site selection process.

Today, Church says that he no longer receives any complaints from nearby residents about the construction or placement of the jail.

It helped, he added, that the new facility doesn't look like a jail. "If there were strings of barbed wire, floodlights at the corners with gunposts," the neighbors might feel differently, he said.

But, "It's an attractive building that they've taken pains to do the right way," Church said. "I don't have anything negative to say about it."

If Friday's open house is any indication, lots of folks' hostility has died and curiosity has taken hold.

More than 250 dignitaries showed up for a dedication ceremony that morning, and hundreds of people streamed through tours of the facility that started at 1 p.m. Police had to direct traffic around the site as groups of 50 were led through the building.

Teresa Hall, the county's director of public information, said the response was unprecedented for the opening of a public facility in the county.

The sheriffs are uniformly glowing in their praise of the nearly completed facility and of the quality of the 177-member staff jail Superintendent Charlie Poff has hired.

Poff, who was hired after a national search in 2006, has three decades of corrections experience, most of it in Roanoke and Roanoke County.

While his staff has many newcomers to corrections, there are also a lot of veterans -- with a total of more than 550 combined years of experience.

"I feel like we have an all-star team there," Salem's Sheriff Atkins said. And it's a diverse group by almost any measure -- age, race, sex.

It includes people such as Sgt. Rachel Wylie, who has a decade's experience in corrections. The new jail is "just a great place to work, a great opportunity," she said.

The extensive training the officers have undergone includes some opportunities most people might just as soon pass on, such as experiencing being shot with an electroshock weapon.

Wylie volunteered for that one. It didn't hurt more than a bee sting, she said, "but I felt like I couldn't move." After the weapon's five-second shock, she understood why it was so effective. "I couldn't have held any weapon."

Another new officer is Emily Goad, who'll commute an hour each way from her home in Carroll County to work in Glenvar.

She worked two years at the Pulaski Correctional Facility, which closed at the end of last year.

The athletic Goad said she was drawn to corrections by the physical and mental challenges the work offers. She had nothing but praise for her new co-workers, even the newbies.

"I'd work on the cell block with any one of them, any day," she said.

She was particularly impressed with their attitudes toward their work.

"You have to have a good sense of humor, otherwise you'd lose your mind."