International Courant
A supervisor who managed safety at a South Carolina jail accepted greater than $219,000 in bribes over three years and acquired 173 contraband cellphones for inmates, in line with federal prosecutors.
Christine Mary Livingston, 46, was indicted earlier this month on 15 costs 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 command of safety on the medium-security Columbia jail, investigators mentioned.
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Livingston labored with an inmate, 33-year-old Jerell Reaves, to simply accept bribes for cellphones and different contraband equipment. They might take $1,000 to $7,000 over the good cellphone Money App cash switch program for a cellphone, in line with the federal indictment unsealed Thursday.
Reaves was generally known as Hell Rell and Livingston was generally known as Hell Rell’s Queen, federal prosecutors mentioned.
Each withstand 20 years in jail, a $250,000 nice 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 taking pictures 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 mentioned inmates have run drug rings, fraud schemes and have even ordered killings from behind bars.
A South Carolina jail supervisor is accused of taking on $219,000 in bribes and offering 173 contraband cellphones to inmates.
A 2018 riot that killed seven inmates at Lee Correctional Instinct was fueled by cellphones.
“This girl broke the general public belief in South Carolina, making our prisons much less secure for inmates, employees and the group. We are going to completely not tolerate officers and workers bringing contraband into our prisons, and I’m glad she is being held accountable,” Stirling mentioned in a press release.
The South Carolina jail system has implored federal officers to allow them to jam cellphone alerts in prisons however have not gotten permission.
Lately, they’ve had success with a tool that identifies all cellphones on jail grounds, permitting workers 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 assist hotline when his cellphone now 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 Basic Meeting to move 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 cellphone, with as much as 5 years for a second offense.
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That invoice has not made it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
