Corrections Officers

An article in Wednesday's Howard County Sun said that in order for police to purchase Tasers, the County Council must repeal a law banning their use. Rather than repeal the entire law, the council must carve out an exception for their use among public safety officers, which includes police, sheriff's deputies and corrections officers.

A day after 18 inmates were seriously injured in an apparent gang fight in a Baltimore prison yard, the Metropolitan Transition Center remained locked down yesterday as authorities began interviewing the more than 100 men who were in the exercise yard at the time of the melee. Three of the injured prisoners remained in serious condition at area hospitals yesterday, a spokesman with the Maryland Division of Correction said. It was unclear whether any of the other 15 hospitalized inmates were returned to the prison, formerly the maximum-security Maryland State Penitentiary.

At least 18 inmates were seriously stabbed or cut and dozens of others were injured when a "major fight" broke out between two groups of prisoners at the Metropolitan Transition Center in Baltimore yesterday, authorities said. The inmates with the worst wounds were taken to area hospitals - three with critical injuries that could be considered life-threatening, said Maj. Priscilla Doggett, spokeswoman for the Maryland Division of Correction. No corrections officers were injured. Doggett said the fight broke out about 1:30 p.m. in the exercise yard of the facility in the downtown state prison complex off Madison Street.

Facing a potentially contentious legislative hearing, prison officials announced disciplinary action yesterday against four more corrections officers whose negligence contributed to the recent escape of two inmates from a Jessup prison.The firing of another guard, the demotion of a captain to lieutenant and written reprimands of a major and another corrections officer complete the internal disciplinary review at the Maryland Correctional Institution, officials said.That brought to nine the number of officers disciplined or transferred as a result of the May 18 escape.

State officials are investigating suspected drug smuggling by prison employees to a powerful ring of inmates at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup.Officials said yesterday that they were also investigating the possibility that female corrections officers sold sex to inmates."We are definitely looking at that," said George B. Brosan, deputy secretary of the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. "Prostitution is not only a violation of law, but within the correction system, any sexual contact between inmates and staff is prohibited."

Several of a Jessup prison's worst inmates attacked a group of corrections officers yesterday afternoon, stabbing two of them in what prison officials say was an isolated and unprovoked assault.The two officers from the Maryland House of Correction were flown to Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, where they were treated for stab wounds to the head and back and released last night. Officials identified them as Gregory McGowen and Officer Alonzo Galloway.Two other officers suffered minor injuries in the assault.

The union representing employees at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup is backing efforts by state officials to investigate corrections officers suspected of smuggling drugs into the prison."

In the wake of a raid last weekend at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, state officials have fired four corrections officers who failed drug tests and another officer has quit after refusing to take the test.Three other officers, who failed preliminary tests during a raid at the prison Feb. 13, have been placed on administrative duty pending the results of follow-up urine tests, authorities said.Officials have also overhauled the prison administration, transferring the warden, Thomas R. Corcoran, and naming one warden to run the House of Correction and another to run the annex next door.

State officials are investigating suspected drug smuggling by prison employees to a powerful ring of inmates at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup.Officials said yesterday that they were also investigating the possibility that female corrections officers sold sex to inmates."We are definitely looking at that," said George B. Brosan, deputy secretary of the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. "Prostitution is not only a violation of law, but within the correction system, any sexual contact between inmates and staff is prohibited."

Four of six sirens that are supposed to warn residents about escapes from the state's sprawling prison complex in Jessup failed to sound Tuesday night when two inmates scaled a fence and disappeared into the woods.State prison officials said they have not determined how the warning system failed. The sirens rotate on top of 25-foot towers scattered around the community that straddles the Anne Arundel and Howard County line.Dave Towers, a spokesman for the Maryland Division of Correction, said one siren is believed to have failed during a recent storm and the other three were found to have been disconnected.

JARRATT, Va. - -A stoically defiant John Allen Muhammad, the sniper who terrified the Washington area in 2002 as he orchestrated 10 fatal and seemingly random shootings, was executed Tuesday night by injection in Virginia's death chamber. Muhammad, 48, was pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m., said Larry Traylor, spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections, speaking in a steady drizzle outside the Greensville Correctional Center. Asked for last words, Muhammad, wearing a blue shirt and denim jeans, declined to speak and "did not acknowledge us," Traylor said.

Interlock law needed Dear Governor O'Malley, Please see the article on the front page of Sunday's Sun, "Road to ruin," regarding Thomas Meighan, the alcoholic and substance abuser with a long history of DWI/DUI convictions who is charged in connection with a driving rampage through the city that included the hit-and-run killing of Johns Hopkins student Miriam Frankl. Please also see "Fighting DUI fatalities in Md." on page 15 of the main section of The Sun. Please champion a new Maryland state law requiring even first-time DUI offenders to use an ignition interlock device.

Less than 24 hours after the July 2006 fatal stabbing of a corrections officer at the now-closed Maryland House of Correction, dozens of officers from other prisons were asked to help strip search and transport about 50 of the Jessup facility's most dangerous inmates. One of the inmates was unruly, defense attorneys for five corrections officers said yesterday. Brandon Matthews kicked at an officer's groin, then went limp and refused to leave his cell. After being carried to a prison chapel to be searched, he fought with officers.

Twenty-one prison guards at the Maryland House of Correction were implicated in contraband smuggling and other corrupt activities in state police reports given to defense lawyers for two inmates accused of killing a corrections officer at the now-closed facility. The allegations of widespread corruption at the House of Correction were made yesterday at a court hearing in Annapolis as defense lawyers argued that the state should be forced to provide them with personnel and disciplinary records of the corrections officers.

A 24-year-old inmate accused of robbing a 74-year-old woman at knifepoint in her Columbia kitchen apparently hanged himself with a bedsheet at the Howard County Detention Center on Wednesday evening, police said yesterday. Brandon I. Reed was the fourth inmate to die by hanging and the fifth inmate who has died at the facility since April 2005. Before that, there had not been a suicide at the detention center since 1999. In response to the first two hangings and an inmate's death from an acute lung infection after a suicide attempt, detention center Director Melanie C. Pereira created a suicide prevention plan that mostly formalized existing practices.

A day after 18 inmates were seriously injured in an apparent gang fight in a Baltimore prison yard, the Metropolitan Transition Center remained locked down yesterday as authorities began interviewing the more than 100 men who were in the exercise yard at the time of the melee. Three of the injured prisoners remained in serious condition at area hospitals yesterday, a spokesman with the Maryland Division of Correction said. It was unclear whether any of the other 15 hospitalized inmates were returned to the prison, formerly the maximum-security Maryland State Penitentiary.

At least 18 inmates were seriously stabbed or cut and dozens of others were injured when a "major fight" broke out between two groups of prisoners at the Metropolitan Transition Center in Baltimore yesterday, authorities said. The inmates with the worst wounds were taken to area hospitals - three with critical injuries that could be considered life-threatening, said Maj. Priscilla Doggett, spokeswoman for the Maryland Division of Correction. No corrections officers were injured. Doggett said the fight broke out about 1:30 p.m. in the exercise yard of the facility in the downtown state prison complex off Madison Street.

HAGERSTOWN -- Gov. Martin O'Malley said yesterday that state corrections officers were put at risk under his predecessor as money was diverted from full staffing and safety measures to pay for rehabilitation and training programs for inmates, and he vowed that he would fully fund both programs. "For starters, or should I say, for restarters, we need to get away from the zero-sum game where we shortchange safety to fund treatment," O'Malley said, referring to Project Restart, an initiative of former Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. that critics say was funded at the expense of full staffing at corrections institutions.

An article in Wednesday's Howard County Sun said that in order for police to purchase Tasers, the County Council must repeal a law banning their use. Rather than repeal the entire law, the council must carve out an exception for their use among public safety officers, which includes police, sheriff's deputies and corrections officers.

The polls must open on time tomorrow The Sun's editorial "Voting machinery" (Oct. 30) briefly mentioned the important opinion the state attorney general recently issued that clarifies that the polls must open on time in tomorrow's election. Marylanders have a right to vote regardless of the number or party affiliation of election judges present. As the opinion states: "The state election law anticipates that election judges may fail to appear or may leave a polling place and states that, in those circumstances, the local board of elections or the other judges at the polling place `may' fill such a vacancy.