JESSUP PRISON RAIDED AGAIN

27 more inmates to be transferred

In a continuing sweep of the Maryland House of Correction in Jessup,
officials again raided the prison yesterday and rounded up 27 more inmates
as part of an effort to rid the facility of apparently widespread drug abuse
and smuggling.

The 27 offenders, mostly violent felons, will be sent to Supermax in
Baltimore, where they will join 19 prisoners removed from Jessup last month.
Six correctional employees have lost their jobs. Five failed a drug test,
and one refused to take the test last month.

The drug sweep has reached other institutions. At the Patuxent Institution,
also in Jessup, three correctional employees and two civilians failed
preliminary drug tests Tuesday. Officials are awaiting final test results.

Maryland officials say Jessup and Patuxent are isolated cases. But drugs in
prisons -- and frequent raids to clean them up -- have become as much a part
of the correctional system nationwide as the proliferation of prisons,
national experts say.

The root of the problem, most say, is more demand. With more than 23 percent
of inmates in state prisons nationally doing time for drug charges -- triple
the rate 15 years ago -- it has become easy for even a few inmates to gain
control over fellow inmates and guards. All they need is a steady supply of
drugs to hand out.

"Drugs have become an extremely lucrative commodity in the system," said
Marc Mauer, assistant director of the Washington-based Sentencing Project, a
nonprofit group that advocates punishment other than prison. "People are
willing to go to great lengths to accommodate that. The demand is certainly
there, and unless we do something to address that part of the problem, it's
going to get worse."

In Maryland, George B. Brosan, deputy secretary of the state Department of
Public Safety and Correctional Services, estimates that 80 percent of
inmates have drug or alcohol addictions.

Brosan said that though only a handful of the hundreds of guards at Jessup
were involved in the ring, the prisoners running it were exercising "undue
influence" over that handful. Officials are also looking into possible
prostitution by female guards for drugs or money.

Yesterday's raid came after dozens of guards offered information on drug
dealing by inmates. Brosan said authorities suspect that some of the inmates
were able to keep control over their drug businesses outside the prison
while locked up.

Trying to stop the drug flow, the department has replaced the warden,
assistant warden and the head of security. The state, too, has tried to
crack down on the department, replacing several top administrators over the
past two years.

Drug use in the United States has been on the rise, especially among young
adults, but not more than in other industrialized nations. The difference,
says Mauer, is that other countries are treating drug offenders rather than
locking them up.

Advocates for treatment say failure to provide it is fueling the booming
prison-building business.

Malinda Miles, director of Prisoners Aid Association of Maryland, one of the
few aid groups for released prisoners, said one of three of the recently
released prisoners who walk through her door on Calvert Street have drug
addictions. She said her workers can barely focus on finding shelters, homes
and jobs for the former inmates because they spend most of their time trying
to get the former prisoners off drugs.

"You just keep wondering how someone can be locked up for 10 years and walk
out of prison with a drug addiction," she said.