Gov. Martin O’Malley said he’s grateful to have shut down the Maryland House of Correction before someone else gotmurdered there.
Prison officials began secretly transferring inmates to other facilities earlier this month after a guard was stabbed earlier this month.
Last year, a correctional officer and three inmates were killed in separate attacks.
“I always felt like we were in a race against time to get our correctional officers and the inmates out of this facility before another stabbing or, God forbid, another murder happened,” O’Malley said Monday at an announcement of the shutdown.
Afterward, state officials toured the empty facility in Jessup. The place smelled; some cells were 45 square feet. Until the last inmates left Saturday night, the prison had been in continuous use since it was built in 1878, state correction officials said.
For 100 years the post-Civil War facility was notorious for prison unrest and violence, earning the nickname “The Cut.”
During the Civil Rights era, massive race riots beset the prison. In 1979, 30 prisoners used a saw to break out, and in 1988, three inmates escaped and gunned down a police officer in Tallahassee.
O’Malley’s announcement came after a newspaper reported that more than 842 inmates were transferred to state and federal prisons around the country, including Kentucky and Virginia.
Barbara Bolen, of Anne Arundel, said she understood the need for secrecy, but was distraught to learn from the media that her son had been moved. Bolen said House of Correction employees on Sunday told her they could not give any information about her son, who had been an inmate in Jessup.
“I was in shock,” said Bolen. “I just wanted to know that he was safe.”
Bolen learned Monday that her son had been moved next door to the Jessup Correctional Institution, a maximum-security facility known as the Annex.
Kimberly Haven, of the inmate rights group Justice Maryland, said she was trying totrack down the locations of some inmates. But she applauded the governor for taking a strong move and hoped it would lead to more improvements.
Sue Esty, executive director of the union representing the facility’s 260 corrections officers, called the prison a “nightmare” full of hidden corners, walkways within arms’ reach of inmates and spots where radios didn’t function.
Esty said most of the corrections officers will be moved to the six correctional institutes that sit within two miles of the House of Correction. The cluster consists of minimum- and maximum-security facilities, women’s prison, boot camp and pre-release units.
Information from the Associated Press was used in this report.
