The county’s food services contract with the Hampton Inn

The county’s food services contract with the Hampton Inn expires in April 1989, and since the restaurant’s new owner is not interested in supplying meals to prisoners three times a day, 365 days of the year, Rappahannock’s supervisors are looking again at a kitchen addition for the jail.

According to County Administrator John McCarthy, the Department of Corrections sees the option of using the school kitchens as a “temporary solution to a long-term problem.”

In a Nov. 10 letter, Department of Corrections inspector Lavinia Johnson pointed to problems with keeping food serving, storage and ordering separate as reason for rejecting this alternative, which has been offered in very general terms by Superintendent David Gangel and the School Board.

She questioned whether the school kitchen would be open in the evenings, on weekends and during summer vacation and holidays and asked how the meals would be transported from the school cafeteria to the jail.

In her letter to Durwood Hill, supervisor for adult facilities, Ms. Johnson recommended that Rappahannock jail have its own in-house kitchen and that work towards this objective begin as soon as possible. She also noted that the State Department of Corrections had offered this same recommendation in May 1986.

“I’m 100 percent against using the schools,” Sheriff John Henry Woodward told the supervisors on Monday. As with the current arrangement, deputies would have to stop other police work to “come clean back across the county to pick up meals,” he said.

And prisoners complain of cold food when the jailer goes, carrying the meals from the Hampton Inn to the jail in the back of his pickup truck, the sheriff added. “I’ve done that only because I have no other way.”

In addition, he said, jail food and school food would have to be kept separate. “Someone is going to have to answer for all the stuff, to sign for it. . .I’m going to have my personnel