Safety And Correctional

The Baltimore branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has requested an emergency meeting with state prison officials after one man was recently stabbed to death at the city's adult jail and a recently disclosed report by the U.S. Department of Justice highlighted problems at the city's juvenile jail. Marvin L. "Doc" Cheatham Sr., president of the city NAACP chapter, said he requested a meeting with the secretaries of the state's Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, which oversees state prisons and Baltimore jails, and the Department of Juveniles Services, which oversees a juvenile jail in the city.

Nineteen inmates -- most of them serving life terms for murder -- were removed from the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup and three correctional officers flunked preliminary drug tests in a surprise sweep of the maximum-security prison that began before dawn yesterday.Nearly 300 correctional officers, state police and police dog teams moved into the prison complex before dawn in what a prison system spokesman termed a combination crackdown and training exercise financed in part by a $475,000 federal grant.

Educating and rehabilitating prisoners instead of merely punishing them will save the state money and spare society some of the crimes that result when ex-offenders are not prepared for release, Maryland's correctional chief said at a forum yesterday. Mary Ann Saar, secretary of the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, outlined plans to give inmates the skills they need to lead productive, law-abiding lives in the outside world. Other forum participants called for changing state laws concerning child support and driver's licenses that result in many inmates leaving prison saddled with debt and unable to obtain licenses.

In a ruling that paves the way for unconditional reinstatement of fired state prison correctional officers, the state's highest court ruled this week that the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services took too long to investigate and discipline three guards. "It's a question of what is fundamentally fair," said Joel A. Smith, a partner in the law firm that represented two of the officers. "The law characteristically adopts time limitations. This is one of them." Two of the three officers were fired - one had used a racial epithet, the other had reported a set of master keys missing on his watch.

The warden at Maryland Correctional Institution-Hagerstown resigned in protest this week, criticizing the Maryland Division of Correction for "dictatorial leadership" and job cuts that show a "disregard for public safety." Joseph Sacchet, who has worked for more than 30 years in the corrections system at all three medium-security prisons near Hagerstown, said in a letter this week to The (Hagerstown) Herald-Mail, his staff and Corrections Commissioner Frank C. Sizer Jr. that he is resigning effective June 30. Through a department spokesman, Sizer said Sacchet "made a decision and we wish him well."

The FBI has launched an investigation into the April 30 death of inmate Ifeanyi A. Iko at Western Correctional Institution in Allegany County, a bureau spokesman said yesterday. "We do have a preliminary inquiry open," said Barry Maddox, a spokesman for the FBI's offices in Baltimore. Iko, 51, a Nigerian immigrant, died after a violent confrontation with correctional officers - a death later ruled by the state medical examiner's office a homicide by asphyxiation. In an internal investigation, Maryland's Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services found no wrongdoing by prison staff.

Eight people who worked at the Maryland Correctional Training Center in Hagerstown have filed a $40 million lawsuit against nine colleagues, alleging that their constitutional rights were violated through "sexually intrusive, humiliating" and unjustified strip-searches performed during a poorly executed drug sweep in 2008. The lawsuit, filed Monday in Washington County Circuit Court, says the plaintiffs were told to strip naked by fellow employees based on readings from drug scanning equipment, then directed to "squat and cough" to see if they were hiding controlled substances in their body cavities.

Dogs have long been used to find drugs in prisons, but the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has found a new use for them: sniffing out cell phones. Three canines were specially trained by Division of Correction K-9 Unit officers to detect cell phones as part of stepped-up efforts to stop contraband from getting into state prisons. In the past few years, Maryland inmates have increasingly been caught with cell phones, which in some cases have been used to arrange drug deals or even killings from behind bars.

THE SUN WRITES (editorial, Jan. 26) that the Glendening administration has no legislation or initiatives to deal with a predicted rise in the number of criminal offenders. Just the opposite is true.Administration legislation, introduced Jan. 22, tackles the issue head-on with the creation of a Commission on Criminal Sentencing Reform that envisions a dramatic reshaping of the way criminals are sentenced and punished in Maryland.By changing the parole and diminution credit system, adjusting the current voluntary sentencing guidelines, and expanding intermediate punishments for appropriate non-violent offenders, the proposed commission seeks both to provide truth in sentencing and to control the long-term growth of corrections costs.

Shawn E. Brown -- described by police as an "inherently evil" predator of children before his conviction last year in the strangling deaths of two Baltimore boys -- was sentenced yesterday to two consecutive life terms without parole plus 30 consecutive years for kidnapping.The sentence makes it virtually impossible for Brown to be released.Brown, who at his jury trial claimed to be a 3,729-year-old immortal who only wanted the boys for research into human sexuality, was sentenced by Baltimore Circuit Judge Joseph P. McCurdy.