Letter from Baltimore

This Is My Jail
Where gang members and their female guards set the rules.

By Jeffrey Toobin
April 7, 2014

While awaiting trial, the gang’s leader fathered five children by four guards. Photograph by Stefan Ruiz
 Save this story

From the issue of April 14, 2014

n January 5, 2013, Tavon White, an inmate at the Baltimore City Detention

O Center, had a cell-phone conversation that was intercepted on an F.B.I.
wiretap. “This is my jail, you understand that,” White told an unidentified friend.
“I’m dead serious. I make every final call in this jail. . . . Everything come to me.
Before a motherfucker hit a nigga in the mouth, guess what they do—they gotta
run it through me. I tell them whether it’s a go ahead and they can do it or
whether they hold back. Before a motherfucker stab somebody, they gotta run it
through me.” White was a leader of a gang called the Black Guerrilla Family. The
gang had such control over inmates in the facility that, as White put it in another
phone call, “I got elevated to the seat where as though nobody in the jail could
outrank me. . . . Like, I am the law. . . . So if I told any motherfucking body they
had to do this, hit a police, do this, kill a motherfucker, anything, it got to be done.
Period.”

White, who was facing trial for the attempted murder of a fellow gang member in
a dispute over drug turf, controlled B.C.D.C. inmates by directing an underground
economy, based principally on the sale of drugs. The B.C.D.C. holds between two
thousand and twenty-three hundred inmates at a time, and the authorities
estimate that about half are addicts of one kind or another. White and his gang
supplied the demand by smuggling and selling tobacco, marijuana, prescription
drugs, and food. Most important, though, was the Black Guerrilla Family’s control
of cell phones inside the jail, because money changed hands through the use of the
phones. Inmates paid for drugs and other contraband by texting fourteen-digit
numbers to load money onto Green Dot MoneyPak cards belonging to Black
Guerrilla Family members inside and outside the facility. Gang leaders, in turn,
used the Green Dot cards to pay their suppliers and enjoy their profits. White
bought a BMW and a Mercedes-Benz while he was an inmate.

Gangs and drugs have plagued prisons for decades, but the problems at the
B.C.D.C. were extreme. Notably, too, many of the crimes were perpetrated by
women. Seventy-five per cent of the six hundred and fifty correctional officers in
the facility were women, and, according to one inmate witness, between sixty and
seventy-five per cent of them were involved in “contraband smuggling and/or
having sexual relationships with inmates.” According to the government, Tavon
White had sexual relationships with four guards and fathered five children by
them. (One of the guards had “Tavon” tattooed on her wrist; another had the
name on her neck.) An inmate and gang member named Jamar Anderson was
involved with five guards. Female guards smuggled the contraband into the facility,
concealing it “in their underwear, hair, internally and elsewhere,” according to a
government filing. The guards were subject to cursory or nonexistent searches
when they entered the premises, and they also brought in the cell phones for the
inmates to use, even though correctional officers were forbidden to carry phones
while working.

In the course of an ongoing federal investigation that became public last year, nine
inmates, including Tavon White, and twenty-seven correctional officers in
Baltimore have been charged with racketeering and other crimes. The case offers a
lesson in how much can go wrong in a single jail and in relations between the
sexes. Cynical and devious men succeeded in dominating women who were
nominally their keepers.

he Baltimore detention center is the oldest continuously operating penal

T facility in the country. The Maryland legislature authorized the construction
of a penitentiary in East Baltimore in 1804, and the first inmates arrived seven
years later. In the eighteen-nineties, the state ordered a significant expansion of
the complex, including the erection of a large, fortresslike central administrative
tower, constructed in a neo-Romanesque style and made out of Port Deposit
granite. More than a hundred years later, the tower, now covered with decades of
soot, remains a Baltimore landmark of sorts, like the nearby Bromo-Seltzer tower.
Wallace Shugg’s “A Monument to Good Intentions,” published in 2000, notes
that, in 1929, a national prison organization characterized the place as “being in
poorer condition than any other in the East.” In 1984, the state attorney general
referred to the south wing as “the innermost circle of hell in the Maryland prison
system.”

The B.C.D.C. is a jail, not a prison; nearly all the inmates are being held on bail
and are awaiting trial. (A few are serving short sentences.) Inmates are called
detainees, and most spend more than twenty hours a day in their cells, which
measure six feet by ten and are shared by two men. Each cell has bunk beds, a
combined sink and rimless toilet, and a single dim light on the wall. In the
nineteen-nineties, the facility shut down its dining room, so the inmates eat in
their cells. Many stuff food down the toilets, which is the cause of endemic
plumbing problems. The heat is balky in the winter, and there’s generally no air-
conditioning in the summer. There’s a lot of turnover, and a constant traffic of
inmates through the long corridors. Armored buses take some two hundred to
court every day. In a city that is about sixty-five per cent African-American, the
B.C.D.C. is, as one administrator told me, “ninety-nine-point-nine per cent
black.” (I saw no white inmates. All the charged inmates and guards are black.)

“It’s like a mini city in there, because you could get anything you could get on the
street,” a former inmate, who called himself Q, told me. “Drugs—prescription and
non-prescription—coke, dope, weed, phones.” According to Q and other former
inmates, prices were standardized. A phone (known as a bike) and charger (a
pump) were three hundred dollars, payable by MoneyPak or by cash passed
between accomplices on the outside. Control of the correctional officers was
critical, because they brought the contraband into the jail. “They would have these
girls eighteen or twenty years old as guards, and everyone knew that the gangs had
recruited them to work inside,” Q explained. “Baltimore is a very small town.
Everyone knows everyone.” A forty-four-year-old former inmate named Kevin,
who now works in construction, told me, “I’ve been in every jail in Maryland, and
the B.C.D.C. was the worst, the most dangerous.” On his last stay at the
B.C.D.C., Kevin was held for attempted murder, but the charge was plea-
bargained to assault. “Let’s say I was getting a lot of money out on the street. The
gang would try to extort me. They saw if you were a weak person. If you was, they
would make you tell them where the money was. They’d make my family send
them the money. They took a lot of people for ransom that way.”

The B.C.D.C. is only somewhat better for the guards than for the inmates. “It’s a
terrible place,” a woman who has worked there for a decade told me. “Nothing
works. The food is horrible. The plumbing doesn’t work. The paint is peeling.
There are cockroaches like that”—she held her fingers about three inches apart. “I
think the inmates respond to the conditions around them.” Some guards found
selective blindness a useful tool for survival. “I keep to myself,” one woman guard,
an eight-year veteran, told me. “The less people you talk to the better. I never saw
a cell phone. I heard rumors about gangs, but I never saw anything.”

Martin Horn, a former Commissioner of Corrections in New York City, who now
teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said, “Everyone talks about
prisons, but jails are in many respects more dangerous for correctional officers.”
Horn supervised Rikers Island, the largest jail complex in the country. “People in
prisons have jobs. It’s their home. They usually figure out ways to make it work.
Jails are where people go at conceivably the worst time in their lives. Huge
numbers of them have addiction and mental-health problems, and they sit around
all day with nothing to do. If they are over eighteen, they don’t have to go to
school. There are usually no jobs in jails. Inmates are waiting for their next court
date, which can be months away. . . . Sex is scarce. So is money, cigarettes,
addictive substances, even television. So they fight with each other for them.”
Salaries for correctional officers at the B.C.D.C. start at about thirty-seven
thousand dollars a year, and any job is coveted in this desolate part of Baltimore.
Brenda V. Smith, a professor at American University Washington College of Law,
who has studied female prison guards and inmates extensively, told me, “Women
are often the only ones who can pass the screens for a job in a jail. You have to
have a high-school degree. You have to pass a background investigation and have
no criminal record. You have to pass a drug test, urinalysis. The men who live
around the jail in Baltimore are less likely to pass those tests. Those jobs have to
go to women. And the female guards in Baltimore came from the same
neighborhoods as the inmates. Many of them knew each other, or knew of each
other, in their prior lives.” Elsewhere in the country, women account for almost
half of all correctional officers.

Most jails in the country, including the one on Rikers Island, are managed by
municipalities. In 1991, because of budgetary and other woes, the State of
Maryland took over the facility and became the only state in the country to run a
local jail and booking center. After that, the problems with corruption continued.

n the early-morning hours of March 4, 2006, a man named Carl Lackl drove
I into East Baltimore with a female acquaintance to buy heroin and crack. When
Lackl stepped out of his car to urinate, he saw a man, later identified as Patrick
Byers, shoot another person, throw away a gun, and then run off. Lackl called the
police to report what he had seen. Byers, who was later arrested and jailed at the
B.C.D.C., learned that Lackl would be a witness in his upcoming trial. Using a
contraband cell phone, Byers put out a twenty-five-hundred-dollar contract for
Lackl’s murder. On July 2, 2007, Jonathan Cornish, a fifteen-year-old Baltimore
resident, went to Lackl’s house under the pretense of buying a car that Lackl was
trying to sell and shot him three times, killing him, in front of his three-year-old
daughter. Federal and state authorities ultimately prosecuted eight people in
connection with Lackl’s death. While awaiting trial at the B.C.D.C. in the Lackl
case, Byers managed to obtain another contraband cell phone. He was later
convicted and sentenced to life in federal prison.

After the Lackl case, Gary Maynard, Maryland’s Secretary of Public Safety and
Correctional Services, chose Wendell France to take charge of the B.C.D.C. At
sixty-two, France still has the slow stride and observant manner of a former beat
cop. As we walked through the halls of the B.C.D.C., he recalled his initial
impressions from 2010, when he took over. “We came in here and said, ‘Holy shit.’
You looked at the systems, and they just weren’t working. How equipment was
being purchased and managed, how loud it was in the hallways. It was wide open.
No one was minding the store. Criminals, given the opportunity, will manipulate
the system.” France proposed that the state bring in federal prosecutors to
undertake a systemic investigation of criminality inside the facility. His boss,
Maynard, found a willing partner in Rod Rosenstein, the United States Attorney
for Maryland. “I came into this job thinking that if you put people in jail you solve
the problem,” Rosenstein told me. “But it quickly became clear to me that we
weren’t solving the problem of gangs and crime at all by putting people in jail.”

Like many prison gangs, the Black Guerrilla Family had operations on the street
in Baltimore (“on land,” in jail argot) as well as inside the B.C.D.C. (“at sea”). In
2011, Rosenstein launched a joint federal and state task force to determine the full
scope of the gang’s operations in the facility. Eventually, the authorities tapped
eleven cell phones, including one belonging to Tavon White.

eorge Jackson, who was convicted of armed robbery in Los Angeles when he
G was eighteen, was sent to California’s Soledad state prison in 1961. He spent
seven of the next ten years in solitary confinement, where he began to educate
himself in radical politics. As he wrote in his book “Soledad Brother,” “I met
Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Engels, and Mao when I entered prison, and they redeemed
me.” In 1968, influenced by the Black Panthers and other radical elements of the
protest movements of the day, Jackson helped found the Black Guerrilla Family.
His lawyer, Fay Stender, who came to be deeply impressed by Jackson’s erudition,
arranged for his letters to be published, with an introduction by Jean Genet.
“Soledad Brother,” which appeared in 1970, became a best-seller.

Jackson’s letters are revealing about his attitude toward women. “The white theory
of ‘the emancipated woman’ is a false idea,” he wrote, and went on:

In the society of our fathers and in the civilized world today, women feel it is their obligation to
be ever yielding and obedient to their men. Life is purposely made simple for them because of
their nature, and they are happy. When the women outnumber the men in the black societies,
the men take as many wives as they can afford, and care for them all equally. In the white for
some nebulous reason the men can take only one. . . . The rest are left to become prostitutes,
nuns, or lesbians. In the civilized societies, the women do light work, bear children, and lend
purpose to the man’s existence. . . . Women like to be dominated, love being strong-armed, need
an overseer to supplement their weakness. . . . It is for them to obey and aid us, not to attempt
to think.

Fay Stender was apparently exempt from Jackson’s general contempt for women.
“You are my favorite person, Fay Stender, take care of yourself,” he wrote in one of
the letters in the book.

In 1970, Jackson was charged with murdering a prison guard, allegedly in

retaliation for the deaths of several inmates. The following year, while awaiting
trial, he pulled a smuggled gun from beneath a wig and took several guards
hostage. In the chaos that followed, two inmates and three guards died in Jackson’s
cell block, and Jackson was killed in the prison yard.

In 1979, an ex-convict named Edward Brooks burst into Fay Stender’s home, in
Berkeley, and forced her to write, “I, Fay Stender, admit I betrayed George Jackson
and the prison movement when they needed me most.” Brooks then shot Stender
six times at point-blank range. Paralyzed and in constant pain, she committed
suicide the following year.
Over time, the Black Guerrilla Family, like other major gangs, including the
Aryan Brotherhood, picked up recruits around the country, as members were
released into the community and then re-arrested. Invariably, the B.G.F. reflected
Jackson’s radical politics, misogyny, and criminality. In Baltimore, the principal
B.G.F. evangelist was an inmate named Eric Brown. While incarcerated in a
lower-security facility on the same campus as the B.C.D.C. in 2007 and 2008,
Brown wrote a manifesto called “The Black Book”—“to make people aware of the
vision of Comrade George Jackson and the struggle that he lived and died for.”
The manifesto celebrates black empowerment, in the name of jamaa (“family,” in
Swahili) and urges readers to “Learn to love yourself and your people, try being a
Black man instead of a big boy.” It condemns the use and sale of drugs and
portrays “poverty, ignorance and oppression” as the true enemies of the black
community. While still an inmate, Brown arranged for publication of the
manifesto as a short paperback, and it was blurbed by several Baltimore-area
academics.

“The Black Book,” too, portrays women as subservient: “The powers that be are
giving the Black Woman a false sense of empowerment by creating wicked laws to
send the Black Man to prison and the Black Woman to the work force. . . . The
Black Woman naturally serves the Black Man by . . . Consoling him, Cooking for
him, Rearing their Children.” The book goes on, “The New Man uses these three
steps to discipline his wife: He verbally reprimands her. He refuses to sleep with
her. He beats her lightly.”
In 2010, Brown and thirteen other members of the Black Guerrilla Family were
indicted for conducting a racketeering conspiracy inside various Maryland prisons
that entailed the use of violence, threats of violence, intimidation, extortion, armed
robberies, money laundering, bribery, narcotics trafficking, retaliation against
witnesses, and obstruction of justice. Brown pleaded guilty and is now serving a
twelve-year sentence. He was moved to a federal prison in Virginia, and leadership
of the gang in the B.C.D.C. fell to Tavon White.
 “This is going to be a two-cupcake Friday.”

he Black Guerrilla Family’s control of the B.C.D.C. was widely

T acknowledged, even by those who weren’t gang members, and were known as
civilians. “I was always a good kid, I went to private school,” a former inmate
named Aaron, who did about six months in the B.C.D.C., after being charged
with assault, told me. “The gang members used to be out of their cells more than
anyone else, except when the C.O.s were having their shift change.” As the
government noted in its indictment, B.G.F. members controlled assignments of
“working men,” the inmates deemed sufficiently trustworthy to work outside their
cells for the guards. “None of the civilians got to be working men—all of them
were B.G.F.,” Aaron said. “All the gang members had cell phones, but if anyone
who wasn’t in the gang had one they’d make sure to take it from you.” Bob, who
did nine months for gun possession in 2009, said, “I saw some gang guys playing
PlayStation 2K Basketball. I asked them if they could get me a cell phone, and
they did, for three hundred dollars.” He hid it in the vent in his dorm room, but
members of the B.G.F. took it while he was asleep. “I was ready to fight for my
phone, but they told me, ‘We don’t fight fair. If you fight one of us, you fight all of
us.’ They was just giving me a warning.” Penalties for defying the gangs included
beatings and milk cartons full of feces thrown into a cell.

Maryland’s legal system is slow-moving, and defendants have wider leeway in

seeking delays than they do in many other states, so the gang’s leaders could
preside in the B.C.D.C. for many months at a time. (With two hung juries in
Tavon White’s attempted-murder case, he was there from 2009 until the 2013
racketeering indictment.) Union rules in Maryland made it almost impossible to
fire guards, even if they were found to have broken the law, emboldening those
who were collaborating with the gang. Finally, much of the poverty and crime in
Maryland is in East Baltimore. A jail in the middle of a ghetto is inevitably
problematic. As one female guard, a three-year veteran, told me, “Look where you
are. The jail’s in the hood. That’s what’s here—drugs and gangs.”

The key factor in the gang’s hegemony was its control of female correctional
officers. Tavon White preyed on vulnerable women. According to a government
filing in the case, documents found in one Maryland prison “detail how new
B.G.F. recruits are taught to target a specific stereotype of a C.O., specifically
women with low self-esteem, insecurities and certain physical attributes.
According to these B.G.F. documents, these C.O.s are prime targets whom B.G.F.
members can manipulate easily.” In a recent law-review article, Brenda Smith and
a co-author elaborated on this point:
In reported narratives of women who became sexually involved with men in custody, they spoke
of all of the benefits of partnering that they were denied in relationships outside of custodial
settings and that they had access to inside. They spoke of being protected from other inmates
and staff in a hostile work environment. They described male inmates’ physical and emotional
availability. They also described feeling in control of the relationship, even if that control was
illusory given the hostile work environment, the risk of discovery, and the potential
administrative and criminal sanctions.

Many relationships between guards and inmates appear to have been consensual,
and initiated by the inmates. “When they started having these really young girls as
guards, that’s when it really went downhill,” the former inmate Kevin said. “They
get infatuated with the gang members.” In a way, the more serious the charges
against an inmate, the more deference he would be accorded by the guards. “Most
of the C.O.s, they was young,” Vernon, another former inmate, told me. “If you
came in with high-profile charges, they would treat you with more respect. The
big-time drug kingpins would be more likely to get what they want. The guards
would worry about the repercussions if they didn’t. There were relationships in
there. I saw a C.O. used to bring McDonald’s to this dude. That’s cause she was
his baby mama.” Jeff, a rare white inmate who has been in and out of the jail
several times, recalled how inmates browbeat certain guards. “Two or three years
ago, I heard a guy say to a woman guard, ‘Who the fuck are you talking to?’ It was
crazy.” Mostly, though, the relationship between gang members and corrupt
guards was symbiotic. As a former inmate named John told me, “They didn’t want
their girls to get kicked out, because that was how they made their money.”

Regardless of the circumstances, prison and jail officials always consider sex
between guards and inmates as abuse by the guards. “Most sexual abuse in prisons
is by staff against inmates, and most inmates are men,” Chris Daley, the deputy
executive director of Just Detention International, a group devoted to stopping
prison rape, told me. In a system where nine out of ten prisoners are male, much
of the abuse is by female guards. “Among victims of staff sexual misconduct,
seventy-nine per cent were males reporting sexual activity with female staff,” a
2012 Justice Department survey of parolees concluded. Another Justice
Department study found that there was more sex between guards and inmates at
the B.C.D.C. than at any other jail in the nation except the Marion County Jail
Intake Facility, in Indiana. About seven per cent of the Baltimore detainees
reported having had sexual contact with a staff member. The national average was
below two per cent.

For the female guards, the rewards of these relationships were financial as well as
emotional. Many inmates were familiar with the profits to be made by the C.O.s.
Rodney, a thirty-nine-year-old former inmate, said, “They can buy a ten-dollar pill
on the street and sell it for a hundred dollars.” Others spoke of cigarettes sold for a
dollar apiece or packets of marijuana for fifty dollars. According to a government
investigator, a correctional officer would buy an ounce of marijuana on the street
for three hundred and fifty dollars, run over it with a car to reduce its size, and seal
it in a vacuum pack for smuggling. Inside the jail, it would be broken down into
twenty-eight packets, which would sell for fifty dollars each, for a total of fourteen
hundred dollars. Guards would buy Percocet on the street for five dollars a pill (or
obtain it free through Medicaid fraud), then sell it inside for fifty dollars a pill. As
a female correctional officer named Ebonee Braswell said on an intercepted phone
call, “Listen, right, this is what I was trying to say. See what I be doing is I be
buying them”—prescription pills—“and I be taking them to work, and they worth
three times the price in there. Like, say, if I buy, even if I buy fifteens up here for
ten dollars, right? I could sell them in there for twenty-five dollars. You know what
I’m saying? So you still making a fifteen-dollar profit off of it.”

Of course, Tavon White, the leader, or Bushman, of the B.G.F. cell, made the most
money. He ran his business in concert with his half brother Ralph Timmons, a
B.G.F. associate on the outside. In a phone call, White said of Timmons, “Every
month, he text what I made. Like a profit of what I made. Like everything added
on. And it came out to, um . . . My profit was fifteen thousand eight hundred and
something. . . . That ain’t bad for a whole month. A lot of people don’t make that
in a month.” (Timmons was murdered in a robbery shortly before White was
indicted in the federal case.)

It was clear, though, that the ties between the guards and the prisoners went
beyond the merely financial, at least on the part of some of the young women.
One of White’s C.O. girlfriends, Jennifer Owens, told him on the phone:

Me and my sisters we was talking right. . . . So I said you know what makes me stay with him?
Sex! It’s that I have two babies by him. Leave him for what? No one’s going to give me sex like
that. . . . Hopefully you’re going to come home soon, but if not I will take some sex in the
meantime.

A correctional officer named Katera Stevenson told another correctional officer

that she had talked to White every day. “He think I’m one of the most crazy baby
mothers he has,” she said. “He said he gonna pay my rent. Two hundred eighty-
four every month. That’s what he said.”
Inmates also sought to entice guards into sexual relationships because the guards
generally shared the proceeds of their smuggling operations with their boyfriends.
In a telephone conversation with Tavon White on February 10, 2013, a
correctional officer named Adrena Rice took note of this pattern and made clear
that such benevolence was not for her:

When I came back in the jail, I’m like, shit, I’m not going to stop making my money. You feel
me? I seen what the fuck was going on, asked a few people what was up and who was who and
what was what. I am just about my money. You hear me? I love money. I love it. I swear to God.

Rice went on to say that she didn’t want to start a relationship with any inmates,
because then she would have to share her money with them:

I said, “Man, no, I got to do this on my own. I need my own money. I can’t split my money.”
And that’s how I got it. You feel me? See this, this the crazy part about it, yo. Most of these
bitches, when they start fucking with niggas, like it suppose to be the business. You feel me? But
once they start fucking these niggas, they want to start playing with the niggas. Fuck that shit. If
I be with the nigga, I am going to have to split my money, bring his shit in for free. Naw! I love
money, Tay. I want my own money. You hear me? You put yours to side. I got my own. I ain’t
trying to fuck with no nigga in there. Fuck no! Man, I want my money!

hortly after Tavon White was indicted last year, he pleaded guilty to the
S federal charges against him and to the attempted murder in the case in which
there had previously been two hung juries. He is currently being held outside
Maryland and has not yet been sentenced. (Through his attorney, White declined
to comment.) So far, five inmates and eleven guards have also taken pleas in the
case. No trials are currently scheduled; it appears that all the defendants may plead
guilty.

In the absence of trials, some of the defendants, especially the former correctional
officers, are using their sentencing hearings, before Judge Ellen L. Hollander, to
argue that they deserve a measure of sympathy. The case of Taryn Kirkland, a
correctional officer who pleaded guilty, is typical. The daughter of a single mother
and an incarcerated father, she went to work in Baltimore’s criminal-booking
facility shortly after she graduated from high school, at eighteen. She soon became
pregnant and had a daughter, raising her as a single mother. She then started work
as an officer at the B.C.D.C. She was twenty-three when she was arrested in the
racketeering case.

As a guard, Kirkland became sexually involved with Steven Loney, whom

prosecutors have described as Tavon White’s second-in-command. In a
submission to the court, Kirkland’s lawyer, Charles N. Curlett, Jr., wrote, “She
worked diligently and met all of her responsibilities in her life. But in time, Ms.
Kirkland was identified by B.G.F. as vulnerable, and Steven Loney began his
seduction of her.” Curlett noted that the wiretap of Loney’s phone included many
hours of conversations between him and Kirkland, and the pair spent relatively
little time talking about their illegal activities. Virtually all the calls ended with
each saying to the other, “I love you.”
Curlett also alleged that the culture of the B.C.D.C. and the misfeasance of the
jail authorities caused the actions of Kirkland and the other guards. “This is a top-
down type of endeavor,” Curlett told the Judge. “What I am pointing to is the
evidence that is provided by the government that makes it very clear that this type
of permissive environment was condoned at all levels of the system.” As Curlett
and others have pointed out, only two B.C.D.C. sergeants, who rank just above
the correctional officers, have been charged in the case, and no higher-ranking jail
officials have been charged. Could such pervasive corruption have taken place
without the involvement of more senior officials?

In Kirkland’s sentencing hearing before Judge Hollander, the government was

represented by Robert Harding, a veteran federal prosecutor (with a Ph.D. in
French history from Yale), who has handled the investigation since its inception.
Tall, gangly, his face shadowed by large eyeglasses, Harding speaks with a weary
indignation about corruption at the jail. To refute Curlett’s plea for sympathy,
Harding said, “Ms. Kirkland was one of the very most prolific of the abusers of the
system, one of the ones who worked the longest and hardest at smuggling and
generally subverting the proper administration of the Baltimore City Detention
Center.” He produced a chart showing that in a single two-week period Kirkland
made deposits on her Green Dot card of more than eight thousand dollars. “This
is a few days’ worth of the activity and illustrates how vitally important Ms.
Kirkland was to the successful operation of Mr. Loney’s contraband-smuggling
system at B.C.D.C.,” Harding said.

The prosecutor rejected the claim that the smuggling operation was somehow
authorized by higher-ups. “Before this submission of the defense sentencing
memoranda in this case,” Harding said, “we have never encountered this
Nuremberg defense—that the correctional officer was just following orders or
obeying policy in contraband smuggling. No correctional officer has suggested
that.” Nevertheless, fourteen higher-ranking supervisors at the B.C.D.C. have
been transferred or have resigned since the indictments in the case, and Harding
noted that the investigation is continuing. Curlett asked for a sentence of
probation; Harding sought up to forty-six months. The Judge gave Kirkland forty-
two months. The other guards have received similar sentences.
So far, the only inmate to be sentenced is Steven Loney, an especially
unsympathetic defendant. Though only twenty-four, Loney has an extensive
criminal record, including a conviction for an assault that involved a shooting. At
his sentencing, Loney told the Judge:

You all keep sending me to jail. Send me to jail. Jail is making me worse. You all can’t tell that? I
ain’t been on the streets. I been locked up my whole life. . . . They say I’ve been a substance
abuser since I was seventeen. I’ve been locked up since I was nineteen years old, Your Honor.
From nineteen to now, I’ve been home for a hundred and twenty days. The government never
offer me no treatment. They never did nothing. They wonder why I still do stuff. You send me
to the same problem. You sent me to Baltimore City Detention Center, where all that’s going
on. And, obviously, I need help. Ain’t nobody can give me a chance to help me.

Loney was sentenced to nine years.

he political fallout from the B.C.D.C. scandal has been borne largely by
T Martin O’Malley, who was reëlected as governor of Maryland in 2010 and is
considering a run for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 2016. O’Malley
has long been familiar with the corruption at the jail. After he graduated from law
school, in 1988, he went to work as a junior state prosecutor in Baltimore. “When
I started, one of the first things the older pros cautioned us about was our
correctional officers whose integrity had been compromised by the inmates,”
O’Malley told me. “So this story is not exactly new. I’m surprised everyone’s
surprised.”

Even though his administration initiated the investigation that led to the arrests at
the B.C.D.C., O’Malley has been blamed for the problems. The Baltimore Sun’s
Ian Duncan has pursued the case relentlessly. As part of an effort to get in front of
the story, O’Malley held a news conference in the visiting room of the jail on
February 7th, to announce a technological fix. Flanked by uniformed guards and
facing a half-dozen news cameras, O’Malley brought the forlorn room an unusual
jolt of attention. A sign on the wall read, “Parents—Your children are your
responsibility. Do not allow them to lean on or hang on the Plexiglas divider in
the booth. Do not allow them to stand on or hang on the mechanical sliding
doors/grilles.”

In July, 2009, O’Malley had sought permission from the federal government to
block cell-phone transmissions in Maryland prisons. The F.C.C. refused, citing
the possible impact on cell reception in the area. At the news conference,
O’Malley revealed that there was now “managed access” technology, which
differentiates between authorized and unauthorized devices in a given area and
blocks use of the latter. “This technology arms our dedicated correctional staff
with additional tools they need to crack down on cell phones in our facilities,
protect integrity, and insure the safety and security of our correctional system,”
O’Malley said.

The new cell technology is part of a package of reforms for the B.C.D.C.,
including improved background checks for guards, more polygraph tests once the
guards are hired, the recruitment of a hundred male guards (women now account
for only sixty-one per cent of the correctional officers, down from seventy-five per
cent), and weekly reviews to determine if any detainee has been held longer than
eighteen months. Old surveillance cameras have been repaired and new ones
added. The correctional officers now have to bring their belongings into the
building in clear plastic bags. The jail is also reopening its dining room. O’Malley
has no sympathy for the female guards who have been charged. “Shame on them,”
he told me. “Nobody forced them into jobs. Sometimes people make bad decisions
and the fact that they have difficult jobs shouldn’t be a defense for corruption.” ♦
Published in the print edition of the April 14, 2014, issue.
Jeffrey Toobin, the chief legal analyst for CNN, was a staff writer at The New Yorker from
1993 to 2020.

More: Baltimore Cell Phones Corruption Drugs Gangs Jails Jean Genet Jr. Maryland

Politics Prison Guards Prisons Race Rod Rosenstein Women

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