Division Of Correction

An article in Friday's Carroll County section of The Sun incorrectly stated the relationship between the Central Laundry Facility and Springfield Hospital Center. The Central Laundry Facility is operated by the state's Division of Correction and is not part of the hospital.The Sun regrets the error.

Moments before he was sentenced to four life terms for killing his parents and two younger brothers, 16-year-old Nicholas W. Browning turned to his remaining relatives in a Towson courtroom yesterday and, tears streaming down his face, asked for their forgiveness. Apparently too overcome to read the handwritten statement he had composed, he handed it to one of his lawyers. "I cannot make the pain go away," recited the attorney, Joshua R. Treem. "I never considered what effect my actions would have.

The former warden at the Maryland Correctional Institution in Hagerstown has been fired from the job he was transferred to after a riot at MCI last spring, a state prison official said.Mason W. Waters Jr., warden at the prison when the riot occurred there in May, was told last week that he had been terminated from his new job at the prison system headquarters in Baltimore, effective Nov. 19, said Sgt. Gregory M. Shipley, a spokesman for the state Division of Correction.Waters was transferred from MCI last July.

If the calendar on your wall says it's Dec. 29 - and it should - then that doesn't just mean it's my 56th birthday. It means it's time for my annual Chutzpah Awards, given at the end of each year to those whose audacity and gall would consistently register a 20 if measured on a scale of 1 to 10. Without any ado whatsoever, I'll get right to it. 10th place: The Baltimore Orioles, for having the nerve to pretend they're a major league baseball team....

In yesterday's editions of The Sun, the Associated Press reported erroneously that Stephen Z. Meehan had been appointed by the state attorney general's office to represent Warren R. Stevenson, a Roxbury Correctional Institution inmate on a hunger strike.Meehan is an attorney with the Prisoner Rights Information System of Maryland Inc., a state-funded agency that provides legal services to Maryland Division of Correction inmates.The Sun regrets the error.Pub Date: 12/25/97

An article in Friday's Carroll County section of The Sun incorrectly stated the relationship between the Central Laundry Facility and Springfield Hospital Center. The Central Laundry Facility is operated by the state's Division of Correction and is not part of the hospital.The Sun regrets the error.A 40-year-old man serving 22 years for armed robbery and burglary escaped from custody at the Central Laundry Facility at Springfield State Hospital in Sykesville Wednesday afternoon.Randal Bryson, who has been confined to the Division of Correction since March 1985, was returning to the facility about 4:30 p.m. He had been taken to the House of Correction in Jessup for medical treatment, and bolted from a van when it returned to the Springfield parking lot, correction officials said.

John Frederick Thanos, the rapist and robber charged in two recent murders, would still be in prison if the Division of Correction had not adopted a policy a month before his release that radically changed the way Maryland calculates an inmate's time behind bars, a correction official said.In fact, Thanos was released about 1 1/2 years earlier than he would have been before the policy change, said a correction official familiar with Thanos' records who requested anonymity.Since his release, Thanos, 41, has been charged with two murders, an attempted murder, two robberies and a handful of lesser crimes that occurred on the Eastern Shore andin Baltimore County between Aug. 29 and Sept.

An assistant warden of the Eastern Correctional Institution in Somerset County has been fired after a 24-year career in the state prison system.Division of Correction spokeswoman Maxine Eldridge said Lewis E. Williams' employment would end Dec. 23. She refused to say whether he had been terminated, although she acknowledged that he "received notice" last Friday."

Guards found an inmate with stab wounds in the neck and chest about 8: 25 p.m. yesterday in a recreation yard at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, a state Division of Correction spokesman said.The inmate, 37, whose name was not released, was in stable condition at Maryland Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore, spokesman Dave Towers said.No arrest had been made and no weapon was found, he said. Inmates will be confined to their cells during an investigation, he said.Pub Date: 8/26/97

A 29-year-old convicted robber escaped from a correctional officer yesterday while being escorted across a Baltimore street to a downtown prison.Bryan M. Jeffreys was being walked back to the Baltimore City Correctional Center from a job-training program about 3 p.m. when he broke free from the officer and ran south on Greenmount Avenue, said Maxine Eldridge, a spokeswoman for the Division of Correction.Jeffreys was serving a 13-year sentence for assault and robbery, Ms. Eldridge said. His last known address was in the 600 block of Bouldin St. in Baltimore.

A state prison inmate who was hit by a truck and killed Thursday while working along the Capital Beltway was identified yesterday as Rodney Jennings, 28, who had been serving a two-year sentence for possession of drugs with intent to distribute. Maj. Priscilla Doggett, a spokeswoman for the Division of Correction, said the prison system is suspending road work crews from the Herman L. Toulson Boot Camp in Jessup until better safety standards can be established. The incident was the second fatality involving a Division of Correction highway crew member in the past three months.

A fight that broke out among detainees on a transport van at the Baltimore City Detention Center was brought under control by a an elite response team of correctional officers who happened to be gathered across the street. The team of about a dozen officers was outside Supermax, a maximum-security prison in the 400 block of E. Madison St., when the fight began shortly before 4 p.m. yesterday. A van returning from court with five detainees entered the gate at the detention center. Once the van was inside, two detainees in the vehicle began fighting, according to Barbara Cooper, a spokeswoman for the city detention center.

An inmate stabbed a correctional officer at a maximum-security state prison in Jessup yesterday as a group of inmates was being led to the cafeteria for breakfast, authorities said. The officer - whose name was withheld - sustained nonlife-threatening injuries in the attack at the Jessup Correctional Institution, formerly known as the House of Correction Annex, and was treated and released at a local medical center, said spokesman George Gregory. The latest attack on a correctional officer comes after state officials announced last week a $7 million infusion of funds to improve security at Maryland prisons.

The commissioner of the Maryland Division of Correction retired yesterday amid continuing turmoil over the state's troubled prisons and the slayings of two correctional officers by inmates this year. Frank C. Sizer Jr., 62, delivered his resignation in the form of a two weeks' notice yesterday afternoon to Public Safety and Correctional Services Secretary Mary Ann Saar, said Jacqueline Lampell, her spokeswoman. "He simply told the secretary he was retiring," Lampell said. "I can't comment on her response.

The attempted sexual assault of a female correctional officer at Roxbury Correctional Institution in Hagerstown last week has intensified tensions between officers in Western Maryland and state prison administrators over staff cutbacks at the facility. "Morale among officers is at an all-time low," said Del. John P. Donoghue, a Hagerstown Democrat who has represented the area for 16 years. "This latest incident is a shining example of why the [staff] cuts are so wrong." Officers and former wardens from the Hagerstown region have complained publicly in recent weeks that staff cuts are jeopardizing their safety.

Kevin G. Johns Jr., a convicted killer who was given a life sentence last week for killing his cellmate, is a suspect in the prison bus slaying of a 20-year- old inmate who testified about him in a Hagerstown court, according to a law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation. The source spoke on condition of anonymity. The victim, Philip E. Parker Jr., had been brought to Hagerstown last week with other inmates to testify that Johns, 22, who was convicted of killing his 16-year-old cellmate early in 2004, needed psychiatric treatment.

The Maryland Division of Correction suspended without pay yesterday an Eastern Correctional Institution records supervisor who signed the early-release papers for rapist and robber John F. Thanos, the ex-inmate subsequently charged with killing three people.John P. O'Donnell, 50, who was a records supervisor at the time the release papers were signed in April but has since become a correctional officer at the Somerset County prison, was suspended yesterday morning, pending an appeal and personnel hearing.

The former prison records supervisor suspended without pay for the early release of rapist and robber John F. Thanos was ordered back to work yesterday by a state hearing officer who said the Division of Correction's arguments against him were "faulty" and "cannot be logically justified."John P. O'Donnell, the former records supervisor at Eastern Correctional Institution who signed the April 5 release papers for Thanos, was ordered to return to work at the Somerset County prison, where he became a correctional officer in July after three years as records supervisor.

The type of prison bus in which a Maryland inmate was killed this week had two "segregation cages" set aside for especially dangerous prisoners, according to former inmates who have ridden on the buses. But state correctional authorities would not say yesterday whether a mentally disturbed inmate who had been convicted of killing a cellmate was separated from other prisoners during a trip from Hagerstown to Baltimore. The inmate, Kevin G. Johns Jr., had told a judge during his sentencing Tuesday that he probably would kill again if he wasn't given intensive psychiatric care.

Philip E. Parker Jr., the 20-year-old who died early Wednesday aboard a prison bus staffed with five guards, was strangled in his seat by another inmate who was later found with blood on his wrists, Parker's parents said yesterday. While a spokeswoman for the Maryland Division of Correction said the 35 inmates on the bus from Hagerstown to Baltimore should have all been in handcuffs and leg irons, Philip E. Parker Sr. said he couldn't understand how a properly shackled inmate could have committed a murder, how no one heard anything and how no one knew his son was dead until the bus was unloaded and he didn't get off. "There is no way in this world," said the elder Parker, who has ridden that route as a prisoner himself.