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Officials study prison gangs amid rise in violence
Gangs may have played role in killing of Jessup officer, Ehrlich suggests


By Dave Dishneau
The Associated Press

August 3, 2006, 3:47 PM EDT

HAGERSTOWN -- State corrections officials have begun a new study of prison gangs, including the growing numbers of Spanish-speaking gang members, amid mounting violence against prison workers, an agency spokeswoman said today.

The news follows Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr.'s statement Wednesday linking gangs to the July 25 fatal stabbing of Correctional Officer David McGuinn at the maximum-security Maryland House of Correction in Jessup. Inmates Lamarr C. Harris and Lee E. Stephens have been charged with first-degree murder. McGuinn's funeral was held today in his hometown of Atlantic City, N.J.

"The theory of the case developing in the latest incident is there's increasing gang presence -- gangs who are increasingly violent, gangs who are more than willing to target tough correctional officers," Ehrlich told the Cumberland Times-News.

Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services spokeswoman Karen V. Poe said today that the agency began addressing gang issues at a July 20 meeting in Baltimore involving officials from the divisions of correction, parole and probation, internal investigations and information technology, and managers of several correctional institutions.

She said corrections officials may host a conference later this year, inviting gang experts from across the country.

"Basically, we're strategizing about trying to address this issue systemwide," Poe said.

She said gang problems include an influx of inmates affiliated with Spanish-speaking outfits such as Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13. Such gangs have become active in Maryland in recent years, leading to arrests and convictions of members whose language, dialects and social structure are foreign to prison workers.

"They're not your Bloods and Crips," Poe said, naming two well-established gangs. "We need to look at communicating with them, understanding what they're saying to one another."

Ronald E. Smith, a former Maryland correctional officer who is now a labor relations specialist with the Maryland Classified Employees Association, a prison workers' union, said prison managers need to catch up with gang activity by providing more training. Correctional officers get just 90 minutes of training in gang recognition in the state academy for new recruits, and no continuing education on the subject, Smith said.

"Crips, Bloods, the Black Guerrilla Family, MS-13 -- all these gangs are in there and they're all fighting for territory and control of all the drugs that come into the prison, the flow of money -- anything they can take to show that they have the authority there," he said.

Smith said about two dozen inmates from competing gangs were involved in a brawl inside the medium-security Maryland Correctional Training Center near Hagerstown July 26. On July 11, Julius Pratt, a popular Sunni Muslim inmate leader at the Maryland House of Correction was killed, allegedly by a member of a different Muslim group, The Sun reported.

The rate of assaults on correctional officers in the state's maximum-security prisons nearly doubled from about 3.4 per 100 inmates in 2004 to 6.6 in 2005, according to a budget analysis by the nonpartisan Department of Legislative Services.

On the Net

Department of Public Safety: http://www.dpscs.state.md.us