At least 360 employees of Georgia’s state prison system have been arrested on accusations of smuggling contraband into prisons since 2018, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, with 25 more employees fired for smuggling allegations but not arrested.
The newspaper finds that nearly 8 in 10 of Georgia Department of Corrections employees arrested were women, with nearly half of them 30 years or younger, when ages could be verified.
Those figures reflect in part a prison system that struggles to recruit employees, often hiring young women with no law enforcement experience. Despite recent salary increases, correctional officers in Georgia are paid less than those in many other states.
GEORGIA DEPUTIES ARRESTED AFTER ALLEGEDLY SMUGGLING CONTRABAND INTO JAILS
Corrections Commissioner Tyrone Oliver said he has taken steps to identify corrupt staff since being named to the post in December. “Once we know that they may be compromised, and we get that information, we deal with it and we get them out of there,” he said.
Oliver acknowledged that contraband is the “driving force” for violence inside Georgia prisons, as well as violence that spills into the outside world.
Gang members sometimes recruit allies to come work as officers and smugglers. Other officers can be corrupted by money or intimidated by threats of violence, according to the report.
“We have got a chronic, persistent issue in the state of Georgia of bad apples within the Department of Corrections doing all sorts of things. It’s a problem we’re dealing with every day,” said District Attorney T. Wright Barksdale, whose eight-county rural district includes several prisons.
Barksdale said his office prosecutes as many murder cases from attacks orchestrated from inside prisons as it does from outside.
Some prison employees were paid thousands of dollars before they were caught in schemes that continued for months or years, the newspaper’s investigation found. Those prosecuted rarely face prison time….
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