FILE
– South Carolina Corrections Director Bryan Stirling and Richland
County Sheriff Leon Lott talk after a news conference outside Broad
River Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C., Wednesday, Jan. 31,
2018. Federal prosecutors in April charged a former prison supervisor
with brining in 173 contraband cellphones and taking $219,000 in bribes
over three years.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — A supervisor who
managed security at a South Carolina prison accepted more than $219,000
in bribes over three years and got 173 contraband cellphones for inmates, according to federal prosecutors.
Christine
Mary Livingston, 46, was indicted earlier this month on 15 charges
including bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering.
Livingston
worked for the South Carolina Department of Corrections for 16 years.
She was promoted to captain at Broad River Correctional Institution in
2016, which put her in charge of security at the medium-security
Columbia prison, investigators said.
Livingston
worked with an inmate, 33-year-old Jerell Reaves, to accept bribes for
cellphones and other contraband accessories. They would take $1,000 to
$7,000 over the smart phone Cash App money transfer program for a phone,
according to the federal indictment unsealed Thursday.
Reaves was known as Hell Rell and Livingston was known as Hell Rell’s Queen, federal prosecutors said.
Both face up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and an order to pay back the money they earned illegally if convicted.
Reaves is serving a 15-year sentence for
voluntary manslaughter in the shooting of a man at a Marion County
convenience store in 2015.
Lawyers for Livingston and Reaves did not respond to emails Friday.
Contraband cellphones in South Carolina prisons have been a long-running problem.
Corrections Director Bryan Stirling said inmates have run drug rings,
fraud schemes and have even ordered killings from behind bars.
A 2018 riot that killed seven inmates at Lee Correctional Intuition was fueled by cellphones.
“This
woman broke the public trust in South Carolina, making our prisons less
safe for inmates, staff and the community. We will absolutely not
tolerate officers and employees bringing contraband into our prisons,
and I’m glad she is being held accountable,” Stirling said in a
statement.
The South Carolina prison system has implored
federal officials to let them jam cellphone signals in prisons but
haven’t gotten permission.
Recently, they
have had success with a device that identifies all cellphones on prison
grounds, allowing employees to request mobile phone carriers block the
unauthorized numbers, although Stirling’s agency hasn’t been given
enough money to expand it beyond a one-prison pilot program.
In January, Stirling posted a video
from a frustrated inmate calling a tech support hotline when his phone
no longer worked asking the worker “what can I do to get it turned back
on?” and being told he needed to call a Corrections Department hotline.
From
July 2022 to June 2023, state prison officials issued 2,179 violations
for inmates possessing banned communication devices, and since 2015,
more than 35,000 cellphones have been found. The prison system has about
16,000 inmates.
Stirling has pushed for the General Assembly to pass a bill
specifying cellphones are illegal in prisons instead of being included
in a broad category of contraband and allowing up to an extra year to be
tacked on a sentence for having an illegal phone, with up to five years
for a second offense.
That bill has not made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
1 comment:
I could literally walk through any prison with a radio frequency detector and find every cell phone. Why isn't it being done? Too much money is being made by employees and cell phone companies. Somebody is paying for these cell phones and their plans. It wouldn't take much of an investigator to get the bank records of employees. TDCJ is so corrupt that they had to hire a separate division of State Police Officers to work cases of corruption on each unit. Something stinks in the prison systems. (USA)
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