Press Releases

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — There have been some notable additions to the city jail since Sept. 11. 

Outside, an 8-foot-tall, chain-link fence, topped off with razor wire, and visitor checkpoints have been added to increase security for the eight-story, rust-colored brick building. 

Inside, terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui entered the inmate population. And now John Walker Lindh. They have joined confessed FBI double agent Robert Hanssen, who is still being debriefed, to form a rogue’s gallery of high-profile suspects confined at the city jail. 

Visitor parking, meanwhile, has been moved as far away from the building as possible. 

“We’ve just extended the security perimeter outside,” Alexandria Sheriff James H. Dunning said Thursday. “We’ve broadened it, we’ve hardened it to some extent.” 

Lindh, the American Taliban fighter who arrived a day earlier, was driven under extraordinary security Thursday the two blocks to U.S. District Court for a reading of the charges against him. 

The 20-year-old Californian faces charges that include conspiring to kill fellow Americans in Afghanistan. He will be held at the jail until a preliminary hearing, set for Feb. 6. 

The gathering of Lindh, Hanssen and Moussaoui — so far, the only person charged in the Sept. 11 attacks — is almost routine at the jail, which has housed several other spy suspects over the years, including Aldrich Ames and Harold James Nicholson, as well as alleged killers and drug kingpins. 

Inmates such as Lindh and Moussaoui are in “administrative segregation” and will spend 23 hours daily behind the bars of their identical 80-square-foot cells. 

Each has a mattress atop a concrete slab for a bed, an elevated concrete writing surface and stainless steel sink and toilet. Narrow openings pass as windows. 

“They’re limited in their movement, they’re limited in their activities and especially limited in the contact they have with other inmates,” Dunning said. “However, they are treated with dignity and respect and managed very safely and very securely.” 

With suspected terrorists among the inmates, Dunning said, “We’re concerned, but we’re not terribly worried” that the jail itself may become a target. 

No one has ever died while in custody at the jail, nor escaped from it, he said. 

Officials had begun reviewing security needs before the Sept. 11 attacks. “Obviously the events on that day, and since, have influenced our thinking,” said Dunning. 

The Alexandria Adult Detention Center opened in May 1987, built to house 343 inmates. 

The facility held about 400 inmates Thursday, including about 150 federal inmates as part of a long-standing contract with the U.S. Marshals Service, as well as city inmates. 

The jail is getting more attention and publicity lately because of its newest residents, but it has always handled “very, very high-risk, high-security and very dangerous inmates,” Dunning said. 

“Whether people are sociopaths or psychopathic killers or public inebriates, we have to handle the whole spectrum,” he said.