Warden and Deputy Out at Kentucky Prison As DOC Investigates Guard Misconduct
Warden Charles Craig Hughes, 53, was fired from Southeast State Correctional Complex in Kentucky on February 22, 2024, the same day Deputy Warden Danny Dean McGraw, 52, also resigned from the lockup, which is leased by the state Department of Corrections (DOC) from private prison giant CoreCivic.
DOC provided no other details about the sudden departures. But an investigation published by the Lexington Herald-Leader on February 29, 2024, counted three prison staffers among at least 30 DOC employees found involved in inappropriate relationships with prisoners and parolees over a 16-month period ending in November 2023.
During the same timeframe, another 14 employees were caught smuggling contraband to prisoners in exchange for bribes. Still other employees were disciplined for harassment, use of excessive force and falsifying documents—nice ways of saying they called prisoners racial slurs, beat them and then lied to cover it up.
DOC paid out millions of dollars in overtime during those 16 months to guards working up to 72 hours weekly because 1,038 of 1,955 positions were unfilled—a vacancy rate near 53%. State Secretary of Justice and Public Safety Kerry Harvey told legislators, “Our inmates are pretty keen observers of the environment that they’re living in. They know when we’re short-staffed in a severe way, as we are now. And of course, some of them are going to try to take advantage of that in nefarious ways.”
Yet giving the lie to Harvey’s prisoners-are-devious narrative, it was DOC employees getting in trouble, especially guards: 29 received reprimands or remedial counseling and training while another 62 were fired or quit from one of the system’s 13 prisons, which hold a total of 11,300 prisoners. Associate Professor Judah Schept of the School of Justice Studies at Eastern Kentucky University called being a guard “a very challenging job” involving “mundane daily tasks and being unappreciated and underpaid and feeling isolated and overworked.”
Among those up for sentencing is former guard Trista Fox, 39, who pleaded guilty to third-degree rape after she was caught having sex with an unnamed prisoner in 2022 at Kentucky State Penitentiary. Though the prisoner claimed he “pursued” her for a relationship that he called “consensual,” that’s not legally possible between a prisoner and a guard.
Source: Lexington Herald-Leader
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