Prison

Neighbors of the Patuxent Institution in Jessup say they are relieved by changes made at the maximum-security prison after an inmate's escape two months ago.But many residents -- as well as Del. Virginia M. Thomas, who toured the institution Monday -- say they hope more can be done to increase security at the prison.Among the changes made by prison officials are installing a $52,000 razor wire fence and clarifying the use of sirens to alert residents to future escapes, according to Leonard A. Sipes Jr., spokesman for the state Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services.

Seven inmates at the Eastern Correctional Institution were placed in isolation yesterday, as investigators launched a probe into alleged financial improprieties at the Somerset County prison commissary, correction officials confirmed.A prison source said investigators also planned to question correctional officers at the institution about apparent thefts of goods and money from the commissary operation, but a spokesman for the Division of Correction said he had no knowledge of that aspect of the probe.

THE PROBLEM with Kathleen Kennedy Townsend is that she doesn't remember Gordon Kamka. How could she? She didn't even move to Maryland until three years after Mr. Kamka's controversial reign as prison secretary ended.Yet there is Lieutenant Governor Townsend pushing the same sort of prison ''reform'' that got Maryland in so much trouble.For those too young to remember, Gov. Harry Hughes hired Mr. Kamka in 1979. Instead of constructing more prisons, Mr. Kamka decided ''we can't build our way out of the problem'' of overcrowding.

A prisoner who eviscerated another inmate at a state prison in Jessup and called it self-defense was convicted of first-degree murder yesterday by an Anne Arundel County jury. Jurors deliberated 14 hours over three days before finding Kenneth Lawrence Higgins, 37, guilty of the January 2005 fatal stabbing of Brian Wilson, 21. The verdict ended a week-long trial that portrayed the Maryland House of Correction Annex as a war zone where inmates say they kill so they are not killed. The verdict was an important win for prosecutors, who have seen prison cases collapse amid numerous problems.

A psychologist at the Maryland House of Correction Annex was sexually assaulted yesterday in her office, allegedly by a convicted rapist on a cleaning detail.The woman, 44, was working in her office of the maximum-security Jessup prison about 3 p.m. when the inmate entered her office, said Leonard A. Sipes Jr., a spokesman for the state prison system."He sat on a chair next to her desk. A conversation ensued. She got up to leave and that's when the attack occurred," Mr. Sipes said last night.

Corrections officers restored order at the Maryland Correctional Institution-Hagerstown last night after simultaneous fights broke out in two outdoor areas, a correction spokesman said. No staff members were injured, said Mark Vernarelli, spokesman for the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. The prison is a medium-security facility built in the 1930s, he said. Three institutions at the Hagerstown complex had been on lockdown until Wednesday after an altercation between members of two gangs in the minimum security yard Saturday, said one prison source familiar with the complex who asked not to be identified.

A Crownsville woman who said she would rather die than go to prison apparently tried to commit suicide yesterday by swallowing a handful of pills while on her way to a courthouse holding cell.Deanne Sue Kinsey, 31, of the 300 block of Hall Road had just been sentenced to five years in prison for a probation violation and was being taken to a cell in the Anne Arundel County Courthouse basement shortly after 10 a.m., a sheriff's spokeswoman said.As part of standard procedure, Kinsey was told by a sheriff's deputy to empty her pockets.

Erich Honecker, the Communist boss who built the Berlin Wall, is now in Chile after leaving a reunited Germany that fittingly had become his prison. The operative word is "fittingly" because during his heyday in East Germany he controlled a brutal regime that turned that rump state into a prison for its 17 million inhabitants. Some 350 persons died trying to escape through a border laced with mines, studded with watchtowers, guarded by sharpshooters -- a hellish barrier whose traces still scar the German landscape.

Three bishops -- two Lutherans and a Roman Catholic -- have scheduled a meeting next week with the state's top public safety official to protest new restrictions on religious services in all Maryland prisons.One of the clergymen, Bishop George Paul Mocko of the Delaware-Maryland Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, says the regulations threaten his denomination's effective rehabilitative work among inmates at the men's and women's prisons in Jessup."We have had talks with the wardens of the prisons there without success," Bishop Mocko says, adding that six weeks have passed since an investigation of the clergy's complaints was promised but nothing has happened.

Against all odds, Sharon Gross, inmate No. 906-697, found joy in the birth of her son Hakeem.Gross, a 30-year-old Baltimore woman serving four years for cocaine possession, struggled through 19 hours of labor in shackles and handcuffs. The restraints came off only when she was ready to deliver.No friend or relative was allowed in the hospital to hold her hand and there were no little gifts for Gross after her ordeal -- prison rules prevented her from bringing anything back to jail.Finally, only 36 hours after giving birth, Gross went home -- to the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in Jessup.