Prison

A cabal of corrupt corrections officers and members of the Black Guerrilla Family gang enjoyed nearly free rein inside the Baltimore City Detention Center, federal authorities allege, smuggling drugs and cellphones into the jail and having sexual relationships that left four guards pregnant. An indictment unsealed Tuesday names 25 people - including 13 women working as corrections officers - who face racketeering and drug charges. Twenty of the accused also face money-laundering charges.

If the federal prison that gets Tavon White is anything like the last one I visited, even a charmer such as Bulldog will have a tough time recreating the life of the libertine he had at the Baltimore City Detention Center. White, a reputed leader of the Black Guerrilla Family prison gang, is accused of attempted murder; he's been on trial twice for that charge since 2009. Both trials ended in hung juries, and that explains why White, or "Bulldog," had enough time at the jail to get four of its correctional officers pregnant, one of them twice, according to recent federal indictments.

Claiming to be a "changed man" and teaching courses in finance to his fellow inmates, Maryland savings and loan swindler Tom J. Billman asked a federal judge yesterday to release him from prison after serving only four years of his 40-year sentence for stealing $22 million.Chief U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz rejected the request for immediate release, but may shave several years off Billman's sentence in a hearing next month. Prosecutors didn't object to a modest reduction for Billman, 57, saying there is no need to keep him in prison "until he is a doddering old man."

I was volunteer and then staff chaplain at the Baltimore City Detention Center. I was terminated 2011, four months short of 16 years. The commissioner saw an inmate using the phone in my office as I was listening. This has always been a major element of my job description. Other support staff that interact with inmates do the same. One said to me he thought providing phone access was part of my job. The phones on the sections need cumbersome complex prior arrangements for payment and cannot call many locations needed.

PHILADELPHIA -- Sylvia Seegrist goes to aerobics five times a week, takes physics and writing courses for college credit, works in the prison laundry and, according to her mother, is more stable than she's been for the last 15 years of her tortured life.The wild, dark eyes that glared out from the newspaper photos are no longer wild.And now, despite her psychotic rampage through the Springfield Mall with a $107 department-store rifle in October 1985 -- a rampage that killed two men and a 2-year-old child and wounded seven others -- and despite her sentence of three life terms in a state that doesn't parole lifers, Sylvia Seegrist hopes someday to be released.

Michael J. Mikalajunas, who masterminded the 1988 murder of Christopher L. Weathers along a dark roadside at Fort Meade, has been sentenced to 21 years and 10 months without parole in federal prison.Judge J. Frederick Motz imposed the sentence late Friday in U.S. District Court in Baltimore.The defendant collapsed in tears at the hearing, and his mother pleaded for mercy from the court."I think about it every night," Mikalajunas, 21, of Crofton, said of the murder. "I'm sorry for the pain I caused his [Weathers']

One day last summer at the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup, a prisoner named Dennis Wise took a seat at the back of the tiny cubicle where I hold forth each week as a volunteer writing instructor. It's a loosely structured class and it isn't unusual that prisoners wander in for a session or two and then drift away. While always a possibility that such drifting is a commentary on the quality of the instruction, it is also true that writing is a painful business. The core of regulars who turn out every week come not because they want to, or because someone else wants them to, but because, in the true writer's motivation, they simply have to. Buried inside is something terrible, something wonderful, something that absolutely must come out. All their lives they have tried either to unlock long-imprisoned feelings or to escape them; that they have failed is as evident as their bleak existence in this ancient, decaying prison, far removed from the commerce of the normal world.

John Merzbacher was sentenced to four life sentences for the horrific rape of a young girl ("Supreme Court decisions renew interest in petition fighting convicted child rapist's release," March 22). The recent Supreme Court ruling does not offer an automatic end to his sentence because of insufficient legal counsel about a plea agreement. State and local officials must consider the seriousness of his crimes and keep him in prison. Beyond the rapes of which he was found guilty, there are many untold stories about the vast extent of his abuse of young people.

The letter "Obama should pardon Pollard" (March 18) could not be more wrong when it urges President Barack Obama to pardon the heinous traitor Jonathan Pollard, who is serving a life sentence for causing more harm to U.S. intelligence than any spy had in decades. The writer also has her priorities backward when she says that President Obama needs to "...mend some political fences with Israel and to promote warmer relations with Israeli leaders. " The U.S. gives Israel $3 billion and more every year in military aid, our latest military technology and diplomatic cover at the U.N. for its atrocities against the Palestinians.

Two city drug dealers have been sentenced to prison in separate cases, including one who police said dealt cocaine in a small neighborhood in Northeast Baltimore called the 4X4, according to federal prosecutors. In that case, the Maryland U.S. Attorney's Office said that 30-year-old Tony Robinson, known by "Peterman" and "Pete," was part of a drug group from June 2009 through August 2010 in the area between Edison Highway and Belair Road. Prosecutors said that Robinson pleaded guilty in the case in which he sold 280 grams of cocaine and 5 kilograms of powder cocaine.

An Annapolis man who admitted sending a threatening letter from his prison cell to an Anne Arundel County judge who'd sentenced him to serve 10 years for armed robbery had a year and a day added onto his sentence Friday. "I will send a firebomb into your workplace and destroy you if you become more resistant," said the letter that Richard Glenn Parker Jr., 26, acknowledged sending to Circuit Court Judge Paul A. Hackner after Hackner sentenced him in 2010. The letter was signed Jesus Christ, according to Anne Arundel prosecutors.

As a teenager in the mid-1990s, he moved with his parents to the United States from Pakistan. The family sought and received political asylum. They settled in Baltimore County and operated a gas station. The boy attended Owings Mills High School. His cricket skills helped him excel at baseball, the quintessential American game. "He always seemed like such a nice young man," said the chair of the English department. The nice young man graduated in 1999. He picked up a job as a data administrator with the Maryland Office of Planning.

On this morning 200 years ago, a plucky Irish immigrant, John O'Neill, matched wits with British Adm. Sir George Cockburn, a veteran sea dog in command of a fleet of 19 vessels that sailed into Havre de Grace during the War of 1812. O'Neill was born in Ireland in 1768 and immigrated to America in 1786. After serving under Gen. Henry "Light-Horse Harry" Lee, helping to put an end to the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania in 1794, he settled in Havre de Grace, then a small Upper Chesapeake Bay village with about 60 wooden houses.

Gov. Martin O'Malley on Tuesday called last week's indictments of 25 inmates and correctional officers at the Baltimore City Detention Center "a very positive development" in the state's fight to dismantle violent gangs in state prisons. A day after returning from a weeklong trade mission to Israel, the governor told a State House news conference that he is standing firmly behind Secretary of Public Safety and Correctional Services Gary D. Maynard in the wake of a federal probe that found widespread corruption and smuggling at the city jail.

A Baltimore judge sentenced Policarpio Espinoza Perez to life in prison Monday for conspiring to murder his brother's two children and their young cousin nearly a decade ago in a killing described as the "most horrific" to ever come before the court. The parents of Ricardo and Lucero Espinoza, 8 and 9 years old, came home to their Fallstaff apartment in May 2004 to find the boys and their 10-year-old cousin, Alexis Espejo Quezada, beaten and mutilated, their throats cut and bleeding.

Reviewing national media coverage of the Black Guerrilla Family's virtual takeover of the Baltimore City Detention Center, it's impossible not to feel the pressure mounting on Gov. Martin O'Malley who is expected to return this week from a trip to the Middle East. And how he handles the scandal could go a long way in determining how well he does or doesn't do with those national aspirations we've been hearing so much about the last year. I can see the image of Black Family Guerrilla gang leader Tavon White, who is alleged to have held virtual control of the detention center, haunting O'Malley in attack ads throughout any future campaigns.

A federal judge in Baltimore has dismissed a lawsuit filed by eight state prison workers who claimed a strip search for drugs violated their constitutional rights. The plaintiffs' lawyer said he expects to appeal the opinion entered Thursday by U.S. District Judge J. Frederick Motz. The employees were searched after a drug-sniffing machine falsely signaled they were carrying drugs at the medium-security Maryland Correctional Training Center near Hagerstown in August 2008. The court found that there is no clearly established law regarding the level of suspicion raised by such alerts.

- Nearly 40 years have come and gone since Calvin Ash, a hospital kitchen worker, committed his one and only crime: At the age of 21, he shot to death his estranged wife's boyfriend. A Baltimore judge found him guilty and sentenced him to life in prison in 1972. Under the conditions of his sentence, Mr. Ash would one distant day be eligible for parole. Thirty-two years later, in 2004, the Maryland Parole Commission considered and approved Mr. Ash for release. But there was a catch: In Maryland, the governor can reject the commission's recommendations and, unfortunately for Mr. Ash, his case did not reach the governor's desk until after Martin O'Malley had been elected, in 2006.

I have to applaud Sen. Lisa Gladden for her creative assertion that if future female correctional officers are hired on the basis of having a college degree they would be immune to the sexual advances of male inmates ("Guards protected from discipline, FBI says," April 25). Apparently, Senator Gladden feels that a woman who is better educated than a male inmate who is high school drop-out would be immune to his charms. "If you had college graduates, four-year graduates, do you think they're going to be messing around with a guy who dropped out of high school?"

In a career that's spanned more than four decades in four states, Gary D. Maynard has dealt with inmate sex scandals, prison riots, suicides and shrinking public safety budgets. Last week, the Maryland corrections secretary faced a bank of TV cameras and the latest crisis in his long career. This one would make national news and prompt an outcry from across the state: Gang members allegedly built a wide-ranging criminal enterprise in the Baltimore City Detention Center, dealing drugs and impregnating correctional officers.