Inmate Contraband
Jail Employees Give It to Them
By Daniel Muniz

So how do inmates end up with stuff that they are not supposed to have, such as cell phones and drugs?

Correctional institutions across the nation are notorious for having contraband amply available to prisoners. There are plenty of things that someone who is incarcerated is not supposed to have but those items always seem to be accessible to a select few who are behind bars. So how does it end up in their hands?

All too often, non-uniformed employees or contract workers of a correctional institution gives it to them. Of course every facility has had its share of prison guards who do cross that line and break the rules but those employees are under intense scrutiny and face severe punishments if they were to ever get caught. But for the most part, it often is the people who do not wear a guard uniform that ends up being the accomplice.

Overall, a chain is only as strong as its weakest link and too many times that weak link is the ordinary worker who ends up violating the policies.

One such incident happened in my hometown. 21-year-old medical assistant Danielle Escalera was bringing drugs such as cocaine and marijuana to inmates of the Bexar County Jail of San Antonio Texas. She also provided them with a few other luxuries only available in the outside world such as a cell phone.

There are a multitude of reasons why non-uniformed employees and contract workers do this although a lot of it also depends on their personality and the state of their personal life.

In this incident, a local news story suggested the possibility that sometimes an employee almost becomes a prisoner of the system. The county also agreed with that speculation:

"I think she just got caught up in something she couldn't get out of."

Sgt. Ron Tooke
Bexar County Sheriff's Office
Source: KENS 5 Eyewitness News

But regardless of the reason, perhaps the greatest danger is the inmates themselves. So many of them are conniving and manipulative and they are constantly probing for ways to beat the system. Quite a number of prison guards say that inmates are constantly observing and analyzing prison staff because after all, they have all the time in the world and they also have endless opportunities of trial and error to find weaknesses. And once a weakness is detected, a prisoner will try to find a way to completely exploit it.

The county jail of my hometown has over a thousand of these non-uniformed employees. And by default, the jail is also the biggest consumer of mental health treatments in the city. Consequently, there is always a steady stream of civilian employees and contractors running in and out of the jail especially involving health care. Such a scenario provides abundant opportunities for duplicitous inmates to ensnare accomplices.

There are also so many other municipalities across the nation that are in the same predicament.

Although jails and prisons perform extensive background checks, that is not enough.

New hires need to go through a more thorough orientation program that exhaustively covers why they should never befriend inmates or provide them with contraband. In addition, current employees and contract workers need to have that stern message reinforced on regular intervals such as on an annual or semi-annual basis.

And perhaps an emphasis in this training should also be made about how correctional institutions are made so much more dangerous to inmates as well as to prison staff when contraband is made readily available. These items are very hard to come by which makes them so valuable of a commodity to a prisoner.

In addition, jails have their own shadowy methods of finding out who is violating their policies.

The way that Danielle Escalera was discovered came from a tip from another inmate. There is no honor among thieves so there are always plenty of prisoners who are more than willing to rat out one of their own. It is hard to keep a secret in a jail with so many informants. So acting on that tip led to searching a certain prison cell which turned up the wireless phone. It was then a fairly simple process for jail officials to examine all the telephone numbers that were used and trace it back to the callers and that led to Escalera getting caught.

And as a deterrence, real punishment has to be meted out like a stiff fine instead of just being fired. Increasing the severity of penalties won’t stop all the violators but it will definitely make a number of them think twice about it.

Jails and prisons already have a tough enough time dealing with the hoodlums and thugs that they have to keep incarcerated. They don’t need it to get worse by employees providing contraband to inmates.

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