Christine Mary Livingston, 46, was indicted earlier this month on 15 charges including bribery, conspiracy, wire fraud and money laundering.
Livingston worked for the South Carolina Department of Corrections for 16 years. She was promoted to captain at Broad River Correctional Institution in 2016, which put her in charge of security at the medium-security Columbia prison, investigators said.
Livingston worked with an inmate, 33-year-old Jerell Reaves, to accept bribes for cellphones and other contraband accessories. They would take $1,000 to $7,000 over the smart phone Cash App money transfer program for a phone, according to the federal indictment unsealed Thursday.
Reaves was known as Hell Rell and Livingston was known as Hell Rell’s Queen, federal prosecutors said.
Both face up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and an order to pay back the money they earned illegally if convicted.
Why can’t prisoners have phones, other than to make them miserable and to line the pockets of the prison phone service provider? If they use the phone to commit further crimes, those are already crimes!
US prison have really draconian rules about what you have access to. For instance, they don’t allow books about sex or violence.
Along the draconian lines, they think every waking moment should be punishment.
Lastly, the for-profit system heavily relies on overcharging families for contacting their imprisoned loved ones.
Ya doesn’t make sense to me. Let them have phones.
Unless they try to turn them into shivs I guess that could be bad.
You know the batteries in these things are explosive right
And forks can be used to stab people. But they’re not making people eat with their hands.