CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) - A hidden world of drugs, sex and gang violence thrives inside the state’s prisons - and the officers who are paid to prevent such corruption are instead fueling it.
Prison officers frequently collude with inmates on crimes that endanger staff members, inmates and the public, a Charlotte Observer investigation found.
The newspaper found that prison employees have undermined the intent of incarceration - to punish inmates, rehabilitate them and separate them from society so that they can no longer harm innocent people.
North Carolina taxpayers, who pay more than $1 billion each year to fund the prisons, unwittingly bankroll the corruption. They pay even more when the state reaches legal settlements with inmates who have been abused or mistreated.
State leaders created the very conditions that allow corruption to flourish, the Observer found.
Lawmakers placed many of the state’s 55 prisons in rural areas where it’s hard to recruit employees. And they have failed to provide correctional officers competitive wages.
Prison officials, meanwhile, hire some employees with troubled pasts, and put new officers on the job with minimal training.
They also make it easy for officers to profit illegally - sneaking in drugs, cellphones and weapons. Unlike some states, North Carolina doesn’t frisk officers when they report for duty and has been slow to use technology to find contraband.
The smuggled drugs and phones spur gang violence, allow prisoners to orchestrate crimes outside prison walls and cause many inmates to leave prison as addicted - and dangerous - as when they went in.
State prison leaders say they’re cracking down on corruption. Most of the state’s 8,000 correctional officers are ethical and hardworking, they say.
But leaders know they have a problem.
“Do I think I have corrupt staff in every prison, in every (maximum-security) prison?” said George Solomon, the state’s recently retired director of prisons. “I would be naive to say I didn’t.”
WHAT THE OBSERVER FOUND
To investigate prison corruption, Observer reporters analyzed state data and reviewed thousands of pages of documents. They interviewed or corresponded with more than 65 current and former prison employees, more than 80 inmates, and dozens of prison experts, lawyers and law enforcement officials.
The Observer found:
-Since 2012, at least 70 state employees have been criminally charged for offenses inside the prisons. More than 400 others have been fired for on-the-job misconduct. In some cases, when employees resign while under investigation, no charges are filed. Others are never caught.
-Prison officials have hired officers with histories of crime, violence and unethical behavior, neglecting to follow the examples of states that more thoroughly vet job applicants. One correctional officer was fired from his post in Vermont after he pressed a gun to a man’s head so hard that his ear bled. Four months later, North Carolina hired him to work as a prison officer.
-Employees smuggle in most of the illicit drugs and cellphones to the state’s maximum-security prisons. In the past five years, more than 50 North Carolina prison employees have been charged with bringing contraband into prisons. Some inmates and experts say it’s easier to find drugs in prison than on the street.
-Some officers are accused of torturing inmates. Former prisoner Jerome Peters says he was handcuffed from behind one day in 2012, when three officers assaulted him in a hallway that was not covered by video cameras. They fractured his arm and pelvic bone, leaving him in a wheelchair for a year. Peters and six other Central Prison inmates won settlements from the state after filing lawsuits alleging brutality.
-Since 2012, more than 65 employees have been fired for getting too close to inmates. Some were simply too chatty with them. Others carried on blatant sexual affairs with the prisoners they were supposed to guard. And at the now-closed Wayne Correctional Center, in eastern North Carolina, a former prison substance abuse counselor was accused of carrying on a long-running sexual affair with inmate William Walker, a convicted murderer. Walker says they even had sex on the superintendent’s desk - and that his lover smuggled in a poodle to keep him company on the weekends. The counselor was fired.
’SO MUCH CORRUPTION’
State prison leaders say they have no tolerance for officers who abuse or collude with inmates.
“Where there is misconduct at any level, it will be addressed,” said Erik Hooks, the state’s new Department of Public Safety secretary.
With plans to step up their battle against contraband, prison leaders hope to deploy four airport-style body scanners and four cellphone detection devices at problem prisons. They say they are quick to notify state or local law enforcement agencies when they find officers committing crimes.
State leaders say they’re also working to improve the caliber of staff. They’ve increased pay for correctional officers, expanded their recruitment efforts, and introduced a new assessment tool to ensure candidates are psychologically suited for prison work.
But top prison officials and the state lawmakers who provide their funding have failed to adopt strategies that have proven successful in other states.
Prison officials rarely bring in drug-sniffing dogs, for instance, or even ask officers to turn out their pockets when they report for work each day, current and former employees say. They don’t randomly drug test officers. And they don’t check Facebook pages for signs of trouble in the backgrounds of would-be hires.
Employees said they wonder if some of their colleagues are on the wrong side of the bars.
“It’s sad to say, a lot of times I would trust gang members before I would trust my co-workers,” says Chesenna Ray, a former officer at Polk. “There’s so much corruption. Nobody knows who to trust.”
’A SETUP FOR PROBLEMS’
North Carolina built its largest maximum-security prisons in rural areas, at the direction of lawmakers who said those counties needed an economic boost.
But there was a downside to putting prisons in thinly populated counties: It’s difficult to find enough qualified officers who are willing to live and work in those counties.
“It was a setup for problems from the beginning,” said Jennie Lancaster, a former high-ranking state prison official.
The state fails to give new hires the training they need, many current and former officers say.
Some states require that officers get more than two months of training before they begin working. Not North Carolina. Here, after just one week of orientation, new hires are routinely put on the job guarding career criminals in situations that can turn violent.
Once every eight hours, on average, a North Carolina prison officer was assaulted last year. In April, Sgt. Meggan Callahan was killed as she rushed to put out a trash can fire at Bertie Correctional Institution. Authorities say an inmate beat her to death with the fire extinguisher she’d brought to douse the flames.
Jeffrey Scott Carter, who worked as an officer at Alexander Correctional Institution for eight months in 2015, remembers going through orientation, where he learned a lot about prison policies but almost nothing about the day-to-day requirements of the job.
Then he and another rookie were required to guard 120 inmates in one of the prison’s toughest units. He recalls asking a sergeant on one of his first days what he should do.
“He said, ’The inmates have been here. They’ll tell you what to do.’ “
’THEM OFFICERS ARE BROKE’
North Carolina pays its prison officers an average of about $32,000 a year at minimum-security prisons and $35,000 at maximum-security prisons - less than most animal control officers. Nationally, most correctional officers and jailers are paid far more - an average of about $47,000.
The low pay can make officers susceptible to corruption, inmates and experts say. A pound of marijuana can sell for more than $9,000 inside a prison, and a single cellphone can fetch up to $750.
Troy Person, a former inmate at Scotland Correctional Institution, in Laurinburg, said he paid two officers to bring him cellphones, liquor, condoms, pornography and marijuana, which he resold to fellow prisoners.
“Them officers are broke,” said Person, who served 24 years for multiple counts of forgery. “That’s why there are so many cellphones in prison.”
State funding cuts have also left abusive officers with less to fear.
Lawmakers in 2014 slashed the budget for Prisoner Legal Services, the state-funded agency that once filed lawsuits on behalf of inmates who alleged mistreatment. Now the office is so thinly staffed that inmates have to file their own lawsuits.
“These prisoners have no one to go to,” says Elizabeth Forbes, who heads the criminal justice reform group NC CURE.
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To read the Charlotte Observer’s full series on corruption in the state prisons, go to https://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/article152332332.html
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Information from: The Charlotte Observer, https://www.charlotteobserver.com
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