State Prison

Nine current and former guards at a state prison in Hagerstown were charged Wednesday in a federal indictment that alleges they conspired to assault an inmate and covered up the incident. The U.S. Department of Justice indictment refers to two separate beatings of an inmate, identified only as "K.D.," in the same weekend in March 2008. K.D. was beaten so badly that he had to be taken to a hospital, the indictment says. None of the current and former prison officers was actually charged with assault.

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.

State police are investigating the possible killing of an inmate Tuesday night at a prison in Hagerstown, the fifth such incident at a state prison in six months. State police said the victim was a 22-year-old inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison. Authorities have declined to identify him pending notification of his family. According to state police, the inmate was found standing near a bunk and with blood on his clothes about 10:30 p.m. by a guard conducting a nightly count.

State police are investigating the possible killing of an inmate Tuesday night at a prison in Hagerstown, the fifth such incident at a state prison in six months. State police said the victim was a 22-year-old inmate at the Maryland Correctional Institution, a medium-security prison. Authorities have declined to identify him pending notification of his family. According to state police, the inmate was found standing near a bunk and with blood on his clothes about 10:30 p.m. by a guard conducting a nightly count.

As a federal judge handed down a sentence that will virtually ensure Perry Roark spends the rest of his life behind bars, the founder of Maryland's largest home-grown prison gang renounced his association with the group. Roark, a hulking man known as "Rock," was sentenced to life in a prison Monday for his role in creating Dead Man Inc., an organization of white inmates that prosecutors said has since spread to other states and led to street violence throughout the Baltimore region.

Maryland lost about $3.5 million during the past four years because state prison administrators didn't charge the federal government enough to cover the cost of housing federal prisoners, according to a legislative audit released yesterday. The daily reimbursement rate of $132 has remained unchanged since 1999 even though the cost to house federal inmates at the Maryland Correctional Adjustment Center in Baltimore has risen to $162, auditors wrote. The audit suggested that state corrections officials renegotiate the federal contract each year to fully recover such costs.

A convicted rapist who vanished from the Maryland House of Corrections 23 years ago was charged yesterday with escape, after officials who arrested him on a new charge last fall learned prison officials also sought him. Harvey Jones, 44, was taken from the prison in Jessup to the University of Maryland Hospital on Aug. 3, 1976, for a 9: 30 a.m. appointment and disappeared from there, said Anne Arundel County prosecutors. He had served about 2 1/2 years of a 10-year sentence for raping a 26-year-old housewife.

State prison officials said yesterday they have launched a criminal investigation into allegations that eight correctional officers assaulted several inmates at a maximum-security prison - the second case of possible abuse to emerge at a Western Maryland prison this month. The officers from the North Branch Correctional Institution in Cumberland have been placed on administrative leave and face possible termination, prison officials said yesterday. The Maryland State Police are leading a criminal inquiry into the case, prison authorities said.

A ban on cigarette smoking goes into effect today at Maryland's 25 state prisons, and some correctional officers and inmates are worried about potential violence from the more than 11,000 inmates who smoke and are being forced to quit. The state police and National Guard, which are on call for prison emergencies, have been alerted to the ban and the possibility of trouble. "My concern is that they're being pushed all at once," said M. Kim Howard, president of the Maryland Correctional Law Enforcement Union.

WASHINGTON - The nation's inmate population swelled to more than 2 million for the first time last year, with nearly one in every 142 U.S. residents behind bars, a new Justice Department survey says. In a one-day head count conducted June 30, the 50 states, the District of Columbia and the federal government held 1,355,748 prisoners, accounting for about two-thirds of the nation's incarcerated population, according to the annual survey by the department's Bureau of Justice Statistics. Local, municipal and county facilities nationwide held 665,475 inmates on that day. Statisticians at the agency, which has been tracking the nation's prison population since 1977, acknowledged that it was only a matter of time before this benchmark was reached.

Nine current and former guards at a state prison in Hagerstown were charged Wednesday in a federal indictment that alleges they conspired to assault an inmate and covered up the incident. The U.S. Department of Justice indictment refers to two separate beatings of an inmate, identified only as "K.D.," in the same weekend in March 2008. K.D. was beaten so badly that he had to be taken to a hospital, the indictment says. None of the current and former prison officers was actually charged with assault.

As a federal judge handed down a sentence that will virtually ensure Perry Roark spends the rest of his life behind bars, the founder of Maryland's largest home-grown prison gang renounced his association with the group. Roark, a hulking man known as "Rock," was sentenced to life in a prison Monday for his role in creating Dead Man Inc., an organization of white inmates that prosecutors said has since spread to other states and led to street violence throughout the Baltimore region.

For the first time since taking office five years ago, Gov. Martin O'Malleycommuted the sentence of a Maryland inmate serving life for murder - that of Mark Farley Grant, a Baltimore native who has been incarcerated for 29 years. In commuting Mr. Grant's sentence last month, the governor made no comment about the 44-year-old inmate's credible claim of innocence. A report that made the case for Mr. Grant's wrongful conviction in a 1983 street shooting went from the University of Maryland School of Law to the governor's office four years ago. It was either ignored or discounted.

When Renee Hutchins, the University of Maryland law professor, got her client on the phone Thursday afternoon and told him the news — that the governor was going to commute his life sentence — Mark Farley Grant was "largely speechless and completely stunned. " Hutchins said she will visit her client at the state prison in Hagerstown on Monday. By then, Grant should have a complete understanding of what's happening: freedom after nearly 30 years in prison, but no exoneration and no pardon.

State prison officials say they will no longer demand that job applicants provide passwords to social media accounts. Candidates will be asked for access but have the option of refusing, according to the prison agency. The announcement Wednesday by the Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services was a response to a complaint filed with the American Civil Liberties Union by a corrections job applicant, who said he was offended and troubled by a prison official's request for his Facebook password.

The reputed leader of the growing prison gang Dead Man Inc. has been transferred from state prison to the Anne Arundel County Detention Center to face murder charges in the beating death of fellow inmate in 1994. Though the indictment remains sealed, officials at the Jennifer Road Detention Center say Perry Roark is being held without bond. Court officials confirmed the bail review hearing had taken place Tuesday morning after he was taken before a District Court commissioner. A recording of the hearing was not available Wednesday.

Ronald Lee Moore was freed from prison and walked out of the Baltimore City Correctional Center on a late November day, after serving time on assault and burglary convictions. But Moore was supposed to remain jailed, after having been linked through DNA to a 1999 sexual assault involving a cattle prod. He had been indicted last spring in Anne Arundel County on charges stemming from that assault, and a judge had ordered that he be held without bond. Police are searching for Moore, 40, a former crack addict who has been arrested more than a dozen times for theft, burglary and breaking and entering.

Mary V. Cabassa is on pace to leave prison in about a year and a half with no support system, no job and little counseling to help her deal with the issues that landed her behind bars, convicted of scalding her infant daughter so badly that the child spent more than 100 days in a hospital, her lawyer said yesterday. "That frightens her. Her family is not here. Her ties are not to the community, and she's frightened to death that she's going to come out with nothing in place," Assistant Public Defender Janette DeBoissiere told Howard Circuit Judge Lenore R. Gelfman.

State and federal public safety officials are expected to unveil Tuesday details of how a former maximum-security prison in Baltimore will be used to consolidate housing for most of Maryland's federal pretrial detainees who, in the past, had been spread across 18 jails in the Mid-Atlantic region. As part of the arrangement, the U.S. Department of Justice will contribute an additional $20 million in federal funding to assist in the construction of new minimum-security facilities in Jessup, officials said.

The Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services has suspended its diversion programs for troubled youths, a decision that officials said is not related to a recent portrayal on the A&E network show "Beyond Scared Straight. " The programs, which typically send youths into prisons with hopes of deterring them from a life of crime by having them interact with inmates, were stopped last week, said Rick Binetti, the department's director of communications. In a Jan. 20 episode of the A&E show, set at the state's Jessup facility, an inmate threw a teenager into a bathroom to show what happens behind bars.