A few months into newly elected Sheriff Jerry Sheridan’s term at the helm of Maricopa County’s extensive network of jails and overdoses are going up.
Earlier this month, the sheriff’s office announced there had been a dozen overdoses in one jail in the past week. One person died. Then, Fox 10 reported the following day that two more overdoses were reported at Estrella Jail. The drugs, they believe, are being smuggled in by inmates.
The office says it’s installing X-ray machines to help mitigate the problem, and Sheriff Sheridan joined The Show to discuss.
Full conversation
LAUREN GILGER: Good morning, sheriff. Thanks for coming in.
JERRY SHERIDAN: Good morning. Thanks for having me.
GILGER: So tell us how bad this overdose problem has gotten. It has been bad for, you know, over the years. You'll hear, you know, see headlines here and there of more overdoses being reported. The Arizona Republic now is reporting that the jails are seeing much higher overdose rates so far in 2025 than it did last year. What's it look like from your point of view?
SHERIDAN: It's, it's bad. It's not good. It has been very bad for the last eight years. And when I became a sheriff in January, I inherited some of the issues and so we've been making some big steps to try to mitigate the amount of drugs and of course the overdoses, and we've had one death, so I'm very concerned about that. I'm the sheriff and I feel personally responsible for those deaths.
GILGER: Let me ask you what's behind it. And before we talk about solutions here, you say these drugs are being smuggled in by inmates. Most of them so far are at the women's jail. What's it look like?
SHERIDAN: Well, it, it is. The drugs come in most of the time in the jail system from prisoners that come off the street and they carry them in their body cavities, and we cannot search the body cavities unless we know for sure that there's something in there, then we have to get a search warrant and a medical provider to remove the drugs.
GILGER: Your predecessor Paul Penzone had installed body scanning equipment for this purpose to prevent drugs and other contraband from getting into the jails. You have said you're installing X-ray machines to help address this problem. Would that be in addition to those body scanning machines?
SHERIDAN: Correct. Those body scanning machines that the previous administration brought in don't go into body cavities. It's just like at the airport. They're line scan machines like the X-rays where you put the bags in. And also the one where you hold your arms up, you know, I think we've all been through those, but they don't go into the body cavities. They just look through the clothing.
GILGER: So one of the big changes that you made when you took office was to get rid of a requirement that your predecessor had also put into place to scan employees as well as they entered the jails that came after an employee was found guilty of smuggling drugs into the jails. You took away that requirement. Tell us why.
SHERIDAN: I did because in my experience of 25 years overseeing the jail system and monitoring what was going on, there have been two sheriff's employees that have been found to bring drugs in. That's two over about 25 years. And I didn't think that I'm sending the right message if I continued with not trusting my employees, about 2,000 of them, when only two in 25 years have done something wrong. And so that really helped.
But I've also put a couple of other things in place, and we have a drug sniffing dogs in the intake. They don't work as good as an X-ray machine would to find these drugs, but I've also upped the amount of what we call shakedowns, jail shakedowns where we have teams of officers and our special response team. It's kind of like the jail SWAT team to go in and do searches.
Also I'm beefing up the jail intelligence unit, and I had a very big jail intelligence unit when I was there when I was the chief over the jail system, and they prevented a lot of drugs from coming in in the first place.
GILGER: So some other measures you can take, have any of the incidents so far in 2025 involved employees that you know of?
SHERIDAN: No.
GILGER: So have you heard from employees that they feel better about that? Did they feel like they were being targeted under the old policy?
SHERIDAN: They felt like they weren't trusted and believe me, we hire people. They go through extensive training, background, polygraph, psych tests, and all this stuff. We hire the best employees and so I trust them to do their job. Occasionally, let's let's face it, occasionally somebody goes, goes rogue and does something, but it's such a rare thing that I'm not going to blame the other 2,000 people and put them through that.
GILGER: Let me ask you about other things you can do here. You mentioned, you know, X-ray machines in addition to these body scan machines that would give you the chance to, you know, get the warrant to search someone's body cavities, right? What else can you do? Is this about putting more naloxone in gels? A lot of the drugs being smuggled into the there fentanyl, which are so and and so quickly fatal.
SHERIDAN: Right. Fentanyl is such a dangerous drug. It doesn't take very much and so. The problems we had in Estrella jail, we had some overdoses in a housing unit. We thought we identified the woman that had the drugs. We moved her to another housing unit and behold, within a few hours we had 2 more overdoses, so we identified who this is. We are in the process of seeing if we can't make a manslaughter case against her and some other crimes. So we are actively pursuing that.
GILGER: Is it also about training officers to detect this really quickly because it can become fatal so fast?
SHERIDAN: Yes, absolutely. All officers have Narcan on them and so they immediately give them Narcan when they see somebody that's not doing well.
GILGER: So a few years ago I had toured the jails with the former Sheriff Paul Penzone, and he had showed me all the measures they had put into place to try to prevent this, but the numbers were still high. I wonder at a certain point, do you see this as as kind of impossible? Like, is there a foolproof system here?
SHERIDAN: There's never a foolproof. You're always going to have drugs in a jail in a prison, and there is a difference between jails and prisons, by the way, but officers have to be ever diligent. We have to do our job.
And one of the big problems that we have too is I'm about 840 officers short, so sometimes inmates aren't searched thoroughly because they don't have the time to do it and we move a lot of inmates between one facility and another so they get moved around and sometimes those drugs will get past the search process.
