A female prison guard in the U.K. will experience life on the other side of the iron bars for eight months, thanks to a virtual summer fling involving phone and letter correspondence with a college-aged male inmate last year.
Chelsea Blackwell, 27, pleaded guilty to a charge of misconduct in public office on July 20, the Crown Prosecution Service said in a Thursday news release.
A prison guard at Her Majesty’s Young Offender Institution Aylesbury since February 2015, Blackwell had an inappropriate relationship that lasted from mid-July to early August 2016 and involved 850 text messages and more than 100 phone calls, phone records established, according to CPS.
The CPS release did not go into detail about the nature of the text messages but the Daily Mail reported that a prosecutor described the contents as proving Blackwell as “infatuated” with the prisoner, whom the Mail identified as Emmanuel Callender-Scott, 22, a violent offender doing time for a stabbing he committed when he was 15.
In additional to evidence of phone correspondence, handwriting experts determined there was “very strong evidence” that letters found in the inmate’s possession were penned by Blackwell, CPS said.
There is no indication in either the CPS report nor the Mail’s account of the court proceedings that any sexually explicit images were shared by Blackwell, either by text or with her handwritten correspondence. What’s more, according to the Mail, the judge in the case said there was no evidence Blackwell had ever smuggled contraband into the facility for Callender-Scott.
She initially faced 10 months in prison but Blackwell’s sentence was reduced in exchange for her guilty plea, CPS said.
“Incidents like this by prison officers are extremely rare, but they amount to an abuse of the public’s trust which has the potential to lead to corruption or blackmail. They are treated with the utmost seriousness,” Senior Crown Prosecutor Louise Attrill said in the CPS statement.
• Ken Shepherd can be reached at kshepherd@washingtontimes.com.
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