News Photo by Kayla Wikaryasz Alpena County Sheriff Erik Smith speaks to the Alpena County board of commissioners at the Finance, Ways, and Means committee meeting last week.

ALPENA — Funding for two $8,000 whisper rooms was approved at the Alpena County board of commissioners Finance, Ways, and Means committee meeting last Tuesday.

Whisper rooms are like old fashioned telephone booths, Alpena County Sheriff Erik Smith said, that will allow inmates to have private conversations with their attorney, communicate with Alcoholics Anonymous groups, or talk to a spiritual advisor.

“The sky’s the limit on what our inmates can do in the confidential communications,” Smith said at the meeting.

The Michigan Indigent Defense Commission (MIDC) has potentially got a grant to pay for half of the expense, he said. The other half will be paid using commissary funds, which are collected from inmate sales. No funding will come from the county’s general fund.

The whisper rooms will be located in the jail’s day rooms. Smith said that when the new jail was built, enough rooms were planned to allow for updates in technology.

Now that the jail is housing inmates from three counties, Alcona, Montmorency, and Alpena, there does need to be extra room to make sure inmates can talk to their attorneys privately.

“As we take more and more counties on, there’s more courts,” Smith said in a phone conversation. “A lot of it has to do with trying to do more services for our inmates.”

Currently there are three rooms designated for use by inmates to participate in court hearings and talk with their attorneys, but inmates also have access to tablets that they can use in other rooms. Since COVID-19, courts have been switching to more remote hearings, increasing the demand for more private spaces for court hearings and attorney-client relations.

Smith said in a phone conversation that at conferences he has attended, he has heard good reviews about using whisper rooms in jails.

Smith told the commissioners that he is looking for permission to move forward with the purchase contingent on the MIDC grant.

Commissioner John Kozlowski asked for clarification on the function of whisper rooms.

“I know it’s a weird name, a whisper room, it’s because you can’t hear anything confidential, whatever’s being discussed on the inside,” Smith said.

It was also asked whether Bill Pfeifer, who oversees funding initiatives from the MIDC in the area, had been part of the communications in receiving the MIDC grant. Smith replied that Pfeifer was part of an email thread discussing the whisper rooms.

The commissioners approved the proposal in a unanimous vote.