COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A supervisor who managed safety at a South Carolina jail accepted greater than $219,000 in bribes over three years and bought 173 contraband cellphones for inmates, in response to federal prosecutors.
Christine Mary Livingston, 46, was indicted earlier this month on 15 prices together with bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud and cash laundering.
Livingston labored for the South Carolina Division of Corrections for 16 years. She was promoted to captain at Broad River Correctional Establishment in 2016, which put her in control of safety on the medium-security Columbia jail, investigators stated.
Livingston labored with an inmate, 33-year-old Jerell Reaves, to just accept bribes for cellphones and different contraband equipment. They’d take $1,000 to $7,000 over the sensible telephone Money App cash switch program for a telephone, in response to the federal indictment unsealed Thursday.
Reaves was often known as Hell Rell and Livingston was often known as Hell Rell’s Queen, federal prosecutors stated.
Each withstand 20 years in jail, a $250,000 high quality and an order to pay again the cash they earned illegally if convicted.
Reaves is serving a 15-year sentence for voluntary manslaughter within the capturing of a person at a Marion County comfort retailer in 2015.
Attorneys for Livingston and Reaves didn’t reply to emails Friday.
Contraband cellphones in South Carolina prisons have been a long-running drawback. Corrections Director Bryan Stirling stated 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 Instinct was fueled by cellphones.
“This lady broke the general public belief in South Carolina, making our prisons much less protected for inmates, workers and the neighborhood. We are going to completely not tolerate officers and staff bringing contraband into our prisons, and I’m glad she is being held accountable,” Stirling stated in a press release.
The South Carolina jail system has implored federal officers to allow them to jam cellphone alerts in prisons however haven’t gotten permission.
Not too long ago, they’ve had success with a tool that identifies all cellphones on jail grounds, permitting staff to request cell phone carriers block the unauthorized numbers, though Stirling’s company hasn’t been given sufficient cash to increase it past a one-prison pilot program.
In January, Stirling posted a video from a pissed off inmate calling a tech help hotline when his telephone not labored asking the employee “what can I do to get it turned again on?” and being informed he wanted to name a Corrections Division hotline.
From July 2022 to June 2023, state jail officers issued 2,179 violations for inmates possessing banned communication units, and since 2015, greater than 35,000 cellphones have been discovered. The jail system has about 16,000 inmates.
Stirling has pushed for the Common Meeting to go a invoice specifying cellphones are unlawful in prisons as a substitute of being included in a broad class of contraband and permitting as much as an additional yr to be tacked on a sentence for having an unlawful telephone, with as much as 5 years for a second offense.
That invoice has not made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
