BY Charlie Frago
ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE
 (AP Photo) |
Prison officials confirmed Tuesday that they caught a correctional officer trying to smuggle tobacco mixed with marijuana inside a Subway sandwich into the Jefferson County Jail and Correctional Facility.
Sgt. Benny Shelton, 25, was arrested shortly after another man delivered the sandwiches from the popular national chain to the jail in Pine Bluff on Feb. 27 about 5:45 p.m. After Shelton said he had ordered the sandwiches, a Department of Correction lieutenant examined them and found one containing a plastic bag filled with loose tobacco and a small amount of marijuana.
“Enough to make three or four joints,” Dina Tyler, Correction Department spokesman, wrote in an e-mail.
The other sandwich had a lighter hidden inside the makings.
Shelton, employed by the Correction Department for about 4 1/2 years, was fired. After authorities arrested him on suspicion of introducing contraband into a correctional facility, he was booked into the same jail where he had worked, Tyler said.
No information on bond or court dates was immediately available.
In the past year 30 prison employees have been fired after contraband-related charges, although it wasn’t clear if all the fired employees participated in smuggling, Tyler said.
Twelve dismissals came after employees were found possessing drugs on prison grounds. “Some of those could have had drugs in their car or something,” she said.
About 3,500 people work for the Correction Department.
Since the banning of tobacco inside Arkansas prisons went into effect in January 2000, tobacco has become the biggest contraband item, something that can produce huge profits and tempt employees. A single cigarette costs about $2 on the prison black market.
Last April a contraband ring at the Maximum Security Unit at Tucker was discovered. Large amounts of tobacco and food were found in a horse barn. Three correctional officers quit and seven were disciplined.
In January, the adjacent Tucker Unit became the focus of an intense contraband investigation by prison internal affairs investigators and Arkansas State Police after contraband computers were discovered in outlying buildings on the sprawling prison farm. Eleven employees were fired or have resigned since the probe began in mid-January.
Three vocational instructors for the Riverside Vocational Technical School who taught at Tucker also were implicated.
A Tucker staff member who had been suspended is back at work, the charges against her having proved unfounded, Tyler said Tuesday, adding that the investigation continues.
“I would characterize it as a very vigorous and thorough investigation. When it’s done, I think every rock will have been looked under several times, by several different people,” she wrote in an e-mail.
Also, three officers who were transferred from the women’s Hawkins Center at Wrightsville in January after reportedly using a cell phone to photograph inmates in the shower have been cleared of most wrongdoing in the case, Tyler said.
The allegations, made by an inmate, have proved unfounded, she said. The officer who brought the prohibited cell phone, considered contraband, into the prison has been dismissed for unrelated offenses. The other two officers were reprimanded for “not acting the way they should,” wrote Tyler in an e-mail.
The phone was recovered, but no compromising pictures were found. “We don’t think any pictures were taken of inmates in the shower or anywhere else,” she said.
Copyright 2007 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
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