This episode originally aired on April 1, 2026.
Drugs flow into Ohio’s prisons in ways that are both brazen and clandestine.
The brazen way is with visible and noisy drones making drops inside prison yards or provided by corrections officers themselves.
The clandestine way is when contraband is smuggled inside prisons on tiny pieces of drug-soaked paper.
Potent narcotics addict, and even kill, men and women trying to turn from a life of crime while housed in state-run, taxpayer-funded facilities, which are under constant surveillance.
In the words of one prison official, keeping narcotics out of prisons is "like playing a game of Whac-A-Mole." You close off one route and another one pops up.
Coming up on this hour of All Sides, reporters from the Columbus Dispatch and The Marshall Project discuss their year-long project: Smuggled.
Guests:
- Laura Bischoff, investigative reporter, The Columbus Dispatch
- Doug Livingston, staff writer, The Marshall Project-Cleveland
- Chris Mabe, president, Ohio Civil Service Employees Association
Transcript
This transcript is generated with AI. To ensure its accuracy, review the audio file.
Amy Juravich: Welcome to All Sides with Amy Juravich. Drugs flow into Ohio's prisons in ways that are both brazen and clandestine, dropped by noisy drones or smuggled in by visitors, vendors, or corrections officers. A year-long investigation by the Columbus Dispatch and the Marshall Project Cleveland documents how potent narcotics are addicting and even killing men and women trying to turn from a life of crime. Housed in state-run taxpayer-funded facilities, they are under constant surveillance. In a video that was produced along with the series, Katherine Dixon talks about the human toll.
Katherine Dixon: It was heartbreaking knowing how they found my dad and that there were drugs in his system. Before he went to prison, he was homeless in Sainsville. So while he was in prison, I knew where he was. I knew that, well, what I thought I knew was that he wasn't doing drugs anymore and that he was clean and that he was going to try and get his.
Juravich: Life together for his kids. Joining us now to discuss their investigation, we have Laura Bischoff, investigative reporter at the Columbus Dispatch. Welcome Laura. Hey thanks Amy. And Doug Livingston, staff writer for the Marshall Project Cleveland. Welcome to All Sides Doug.
Doug Livingston: Good morning. The audio we just heard from Katherine Dixon captures what she believed that her father Aaron was safe in a protected environment off the streets in a prison only for him to turn up dead.
Juravich: Laura, how did you learn about Aaron Dixon's death and come to talk to his daughter?
Laura Bischoff: Up asking for autopsies of about 120, 121 people who had died in prison in 23 and 24. And Aaron Dixon's name was among those. And so we started to try to look for next to kin to see if they would be willing to talk to us. And I got a hold of her mother first, and her mother said, I think that my daughter would like to talk you. And they connected us and we drove over, She lives in Eastern Ohio. Sammy Madar, the photographer for The Dispatch, she and I made a little road trip over there and did the interview.
Juravich: And there's similar experiences, another family that you interviewed. You spoke with Amber Hall, who got a call from the warden about her brother, Jason Murphy, who was found unresponsive in his prison cell. In the video accompanying your series, she describes what that conversation was like.
Amber Hall: So I said, well, what hospital is he at? What hospital is at? And then he said, no, he died. And they're not rehabbing, they're not helping anyone. It's a correction system, but there's no rehabilitation taking place. How can you be rehabilitating someone, and there's drugs everywhere, everyone is in there. I won't say everyone, but there's a lot of people that are getting high every day in jail. I mean, it's worse than being on the street, if you ask.
Juravich: Doug, you worked on this investigation for a long time. You heard a lot of stories. Tell me, is what Amber just said there, the drugs in the prison are worse than being on the streets. Do you feel like that's true?
Livingston: It's something we heard often. I heard it in previous reporting on other stories and hearing those stories over and over again kind of drove Laura and I to try and interrogate the system and try and figure out what are the numbers here, what is the tracking, how many people are getting in trouble for intoxication, how many people overdosing, how may people are get treatment for medical emergencies in prisons and you know getting answers to a lot of those numbers is difficult and often the data that we get from the state is incomplete.
But one of the things with Amber and Katherine's stories that we hear from other people who have lost somebody who has died in a prison is that they're kind of in the dark. There's not a lot of information sharing with the families. There are some practical reasons why investigators may not want to share information just as if they were investigating a criminal activity outside of a prison.
But they often get a phone call from the warden saying that somebody has died and there's no more information. Often they don't know to. You know, look for the coroner's reports on the autopsy and toxicology. And I'll just note that, you know, Aaron Dixon, if you ask the prison system how many people overdosed and died in state prisons in 2024, they'll tell you 10, our reporting found about 20. And Aaron Dixons name was not among the 10 that the state tracks.
Juravich: And Laura, Amber touched on something that is interesting because she kind of hit it on the nose. The department, the state department is called the State Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, but she just repeated there several times in that clip that they're not rehabilitating people if there's drugs everywhere in the prison. Did you hear that from other people that it's supposed to be a place where you're getting better?
Bischoff: I've heard complaints over the years from a lot of incarcerated people about how hard it is to get into any kind of programming. It's really in short supply. And it's not really available for anybody who's got a long sentence. It is more likely you'll get into programs the closer you get to your release date. But consider this, 80% of the people who are incarcerated in Ohio prisons have some sort of history of substance abuse problems. Um, the need for treatment and programming is.
Juravich: Really acute and chronic. So your investigation found that there have been 56,000 drug seizures in Ohio's prison since 2020. Doug, how was that number arrived to? How did you get to the 56, 000?
Livingston: Sure, so a previous story I was reporting on was how prison staff are opening mail, that we're starting to scan mail a few years back to prevent drugs from being shipped in through the mail rooms. And one of the allegations by incarcerated people is that their constitutional right to the privacy of being able to share information with their attorneys was being violated.
And I I heard a deposition, I stumbled onto a lawsuit as one of the many incarcerated people who are suing the system over this practice, and a state official was deposed in this lawsuit, and he said that since 2020, they had started tracking the number of times that corrections officers were finding what they suspected to be drugs.
And so we requested that, I got the database, quickly called Laura and said, hey, check this out, there's something here. And the database is kind of a point in time, So when a corrections officer finds something. At the end of their shift, they'll document what they think they found. It's not tested, it's lightly handled to avoid incidental exposure. And the one thing that jumped out in the 56,000 number is that about 4% of the time, they can tell right then and there where it came from, how it got into the prison. And this huge 96% unknown number is what I think Laura and I really wanted to explore.
Bischoff: 96% of the time they don't know where it came from. Okay. Well, yeah, not immediately. This is when they first, you know, log the seizure on at the end of the shift. However, it's really unclear to us whether or not, you that, that percentage grows as they investigate these cases. I don't, it doesn't seem like it grows very much, if at all, because there's that the amount of investigating going on is is pretty limited.
There's limited resources for looking into these things. There is a prison investigator at each prison, sometimes two if it's a higher security, there's a trooper, one or two depending on the security level assigned. The trooper also has road duties, and they have to investigate all crimes on state properties, meaning the prisons. So. There's just not a lot of investigative power behind, you know, to aid them in this.
Livingston: And we know that numbers are driving a lot more discipline. They're definitely being used to write tickets against incarcerated people from 2023 to 2024. The number of people who were written up for a rules violation that's drug related jumped from 12,000 to 20,000, more than 20,00. So people are having what privileges they do have left in prison curtailed or restricted because of the findings of suspected drugs.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about drugs in prisons, the subject of a year-long investigation by the Columbus Dispatch and reporter Laura Bischoff and Marshall Project Cleveland staff writer, Doug Livingston. Doug, the kinds of drugs in the prisons vary, but a lot of your reporting featured K2, which I had not heard of. So what is that? What is K2?
Livingston: Sure, so K2 or Tune are kind of two names that are thrown around by people in prison to describe a paper that has been soaked in some kind of drug. Typically those are synthetic drugs that are made with either compounds or chemicals that may have been created in labs overseas, shipped to America where drug manufacturers here kind of put the pieces together and create a liquid that is then sprayed or soaked into paper.
And the paper is a hard vehicle to detect. It's easier to smuggle, it's easier hide. If you think about getting pulled over while you're driving, if there's a six pack on your driver, on your passenger seat, the officer's not gonna have a problem figuring out what's going on. But if there is just a stack of papers, you're not gonna know that those are drugs. And that's oftentimes what they're looking for inside these prisons.
Juravich: You talk to Annette Chambersmith, the director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. That was her position at the time when you talked to her. She recently took a different job in the governor's office. But here she is describing the steps that prison officials took to try to stop smuggling of drugs on paper products.
Annette Chambersmith: Then we said no cards, like birthday cards and stuff, because they were splitting in between those heavy fibers and putting stuff in. Then we set only eight and a half by 11 paper. Then it was like only blue and black ink. And it just kept moving along to the point where we started copying mail, which was onerous on the correction officers because they had to then deliver all these little pieces of paper.
It moved to the Male Processing Center because now we're not receiving paper at all. We can just avoid that problem. And that's kind of how other things evolved too. We start out here and keep moving forward with it. It's like whack-a-mole. When you shut down one lane, another one tries to open up.
Juravich: Doug, talk to me about that because you were looking into the paper aspect of prisons even before doing this series. So prison officials are trying to stop drugs from coming in on paper, but people keep figuring out a way to get it past security anyway. So right now there is no paper mail allowed in prisons.
Livingston: Yeah, so every piece of mail, they started scanning them as they came into the mail rooms at the individual prisons, really during the pandemic when, you know, visitation was shut down, but they still had this huge drug problem and they were trying to put pressure on anywhere that they could or where they felt that the biggest problem was. Now while drugs found in the mailrooms was just a fraction of the overall problem, they pivoted and they said, all right, we're now going to scan everything. They eventually opened up a mail processing center near the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown in.
Juravich: And that seems like labor, like a laborious process, to scan every piece of paper.
Livingston: Yeah, it's incredible the work that the team up there do there's 12 people who work at the center last year They opened read and then scanned into a machine 158,000 letters and they're reading these by hand and and you know using What they know about the code and the speak that the incarcerated dealers might be using to communicate with people on the outside To to say hey a shipment is coming or a shipment has arrived. So they're they're using what they know about how people talk about drugs and other potentially criminal activity to try and detect those security threats.
Juravich: Laura, I just mentioned Director Annette Chambers-Smith. She has a new job now, but what was her time like being in charge of the Department of Corrections? Was she regarded as being effective at her job?
Bischoff: I guess it depends on who you talk to. I think she definitely had some fans and then some you know not fans. You know she added body cameras to all the corrections officers and did this you know male scanning program. I think you know she it's a it's difficult job to do and she's had it for seven and a half years. She started with the you know the DeWine's term. Back in January of 2019. So, and I'm not sure what her new job is with the governor's office.
But you know, it's interesting is this drug problem. It's not unique to Ohio. It is common in prison systems across the country. And she would say that DRC is actually an example and that other systems have looked to Ohio to look for some of these fixes, such as creating a male scanning central processing.
Juravich: That's what I was going to ask. Do other states scan their mail like this? Do you know, Doug?
Livingston: Yeah, we've seen similar practices in Texas, California, some other states. So Ohio is not the first to do this, but we're seeing a number of states joining.
Bischoff: They, you know, in addition to the male scanning, they've added other stuff like they started a drug sniffing dog program. And the dogs are pretty good at identifying things like marijuana or cocaine. But because these K2 compounds are incredibly varied, it's difficult for the dogs to
Juravich: to be trained to do that. I was wondering if a dog can smell K2 on a piece of paper because in your reporting some of this paper can be as small as a piece of confetti and it can still get you high.
Bischoff: Correct. And it can also get you dead, depending on if you got a hot spot off of that. If they're spraying it onto paper, people can use K2 off the same batch and one person will live and the other person will die because the person who dies, maybe they got a higher concentration of it in their little confetti piece.
Juravich: And Chambers-Smith is quoted in your reporting as saying, more than 80% of people who are incarcerated have a history of substance abuse. So how does that drive the desire or motivation to obtain drugs? So if 80% the people coming in are already drug seeking, then I no wonder she calls it whack-a-mole.
Bischoff: Well, think about it. Our prisons are full of people with drug possession charges and drug dealing charges. And so you have the buyers and the sellers all in enclosed places together. It's a concentrated marketplace.
Livingston: There is an incredible level of desperation sometimes in prisons, often times in prisons. People I've talked to say that, you know, these drugs, you know, for whatever reason, people are using drugs on the outside, they're trying to escape the reality on the inside, they are trying to escape the conditions, the food, the violence. Rats, cockroaches, I've heard just about everything. Not enough water pressure to take a hot shower. So there's a lot of reasons to not be hopeful and I think that desperation along with the profit motive is really what's driving the ability to make so much money and allow this market to flourish.
Juravich: Laura, before we take a break, I want to talk about one other way that drugs get into prisons, which could be a little bit noisy, is with drones, right? So we've seen stories about that, and before even you're reporting on this series, but can you tell me about what are the drones trying to drop into the prisons?
Bischoff: In K2, suboxone strips, other fentanyl, cocaine, methamphetamines, SIM cards, cell phone chargers, cell phones. That's the other thing is like, you know, the mail, the paper mail is only one way of communicating. Incarcerated people in Ohio have these tablets, and so they're allowed to, you and. Phone calls and emails on their tablets. The app is ironically called Getting Out, and so you can email people on the inside.
And that's monitored. Anyway, so there's, back to drones. It used to be that the drone would come in and it would just drop a package in the yard and it'd be a free-for-all. Everybody would be running to go try to grab it. But, you know, that seems a little noticeable. Yeah, that's how it started. But now the drones are so specific and they might be working with somebody who has an illegal cell phone on the inside who says, bring it to sell window X, Y, Z at 2 a.m. And they're able to say, okay, we're coming in. It's very precise. And so, you know, they're delivering right to specific spots.
Livingston: And just to the ingenuity of dealers who are working with people on the outside, some of the ways that they sneak it into the yard, they'll use like an empty potato chip bag to make it look like trash, or they'll sew it inside the carcass of a dead bird.
Bischoff: Yeah, because they're thinking like no one the guards are not the corrections officers are not gonna pick up a dead bird Right there or or go bother to pick up. Uh, you know Lays potato chip bag. That's blowing around
Livingston: or drop a fishing line with a washer, put the package on top of the building, drape that line over top of building and you walk by in the yard, pull your line down and you've got your package.
Juravich: Oh, wow. Okay. But drones are a little bit noisy. I mean, maybe they've gotten less noisy over time. Has the state figured out a way to intercept them? Or, like, is there some sort of, like warning system? Can you put a bubble over so you can see the drone coming? They do.
Bischoff: They do have drone detection technology at most of the prisons, but maybe not all of the prisons. They're not exactly going to tell us, hey, we don't have anything over here. And they have, I think, a mobile unit in which they can detect whether or not there are illegal cell phones in prison and they confiscated like a thousand illegal cell phones in the prisons last year.
And that should be able to say, okay, there's a drone, it's coming in our area, and then they can go intercept it. But it's not fail safe. You could fly higher than the detection system. And just drop your package down. And so in I think 2022 they added more drone detection technology. But there's also FAA restrictions on what they can do in terms of jamming signals and they certainly can't shoot them down. It's a risk to other air traffic.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about a Columbus dispatch and Marshall Project year-long investigation into drugs in prisons. And coming up, we're gonna talk about how corrections officers and other staff are a part of the drug problem. That's when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR. Thanks.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Ohio has spent millions to try to slow the flow of drugs into state prisons. Why isn't it working? One prison official likened it to playing a game of whack-a-mole. You close off one route and another one pops up. The problems and attempts at solutions are well-documented in a year-long investigation by the Ohio Bureau of the USA Today Network, the Columbus Dispatch, and the Marshall Project Cleveland.
Still with us, we have Laura Bischoff, investigative reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. Thanks again for being here, Laura. Hey. And Doug Livingston, staff writer for the Marshall Project Cleveland. Thanks for being her today. Welcome. And one of the most eye-opening interviews you did was with a former corrections officer named Barbara Devine. She's now in the Northeast Rehabilitation Center for possession of drug charges as a corrections officer. In this video that accompanied your series, she talks about how she ended up smuggling drugs and other contraband. She says she was contacted on Facebook by someone who had an illegal cell phone in the prison.
Barbara Devine: He knew everything about my kids. He knew just everything. And he was like, you know, I'm also, I can also make sure that things are taken care of for you in here because there was a issue with an inmate. That had been harassing me and bothering me, and he had that person taken care of. And so I owed him. It was like a form of manipulation. I mean, and so I felt like I kind of had to do it anyway, but then the money aspect, that was what really triggered because I needed the money. I was desperate.
Juravich: And Laura Doug, either one of you, can you expand a little on Barbara's story about what made her vulnerable to becoming a drug smuggler and how she actually ended up doing it?
Livingston: So I actually learned about Barbara when I was talking to another incarcerated person at Ross who was transferred across the street. He used to be at Chillicothe Correctional Institution and he told me about this corrections officer that he knew that was busted for smuggling. And we were having these conversations about who was getting caught and how they catch them.
And so I reach out to Barbara on the Getting Out app and she took some time. I think she said she wanted to. Prey on it and eventually she came forward and she wanted to tell her story to shine a light on this issue of the undercounting of drug dealing done by prison workers.
And Laura and I, I think it's accurate to say we reached out to dozens of people who were busted because they were working as a private contractor, you know, often through like Aramark, the food service company, or they were former state employees like corrections officers and nurses and we're trying to get them to talk about like what drug you into this.
And we knew what they were telling investigators about the problems in their lives. Many of them had gone through a recent divorce, they had debt, they were not happy with their job. This is a tough job. Barbara was hired in 2019 at $18 an hour. She eventually made her way up to $24 an hour, which is what they're hiring in today. But that may be above the prevailing wage in Southeast Ohio. But it's not a lot for one of the most thankless and grueling jobs that we have in Ohio to be a corrections officer in a state prison.
Juravich: And Laura, you also wrote in the series that records show that workers suspected of smuggling often resign, and then some of them don't face charges. Have there been steps taken to hold staff or corrections officers accountable?
Bischoff: So there are two lists. One is about 390 people are on this since 2020 list of banned contractors. They worked in Aramark or another contractor and something came up and DRC said you can't come to prison properties anymore. And then there's another list of 335 former state workers who are not recommended for rehire.
And so on the band list there is like a one or two word reason like conveyance or contraband or inappropriate relationship and oftentimes inappropriate relationship And smuggling go hand-in-hand because there's a personal connection and that is becomes a point of manipulation By the dealer to try and get the person to bring in And but on the on the state employee list, there's no They don't describe why that person ended up being blackballed from another state job.
And so, anyway, we looked at the lists and then compared those against court records to see how often people are investigated. We asked the patrol, hey, there's this number of contractors who were listed as suspected of bringing in drugs or inappropriate relationship. How many of them were charged. A lot of them were not investigated whatsoever.
Juravich: We did reach out to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections in hopes that a representative could join the show today. Their press person, JoEllen Smith, said they wouldn't be able to make anyone available. She provided a 2025 press release that spelled out some of the steps the department has taken to address drugs in prisons. Do one of you want to talk about just a couple of those steps? I mean, we've already mentioned the drone interception. We've mentioned this scanning of the mail, so trying to reduce the number of the paper and Is there other things that stick out for you?
Bischoff: Yeah, there's drone detection, there is the dog sniffing program, they have 14 dogs. They increase the number of, it's called like a tiger team, it is more investigators. They have a mobile unit in which they can detect whether or not there are illegal cell phones in prison and they confiscated like a thousand illegal cell phones in the prisons last year. They have They put higher fencing at some of the prisons so that you can't chuck stuff over the fence anymore. It looks like a top golf facility almost.
Juravich: Instead of a drone, someone would just walk right up to the wall and throw it over. Yeah.
Bischoff: Yeah, and if they if they don't have a good arm, they could just like put it in a potato, a potato launcher like shoot it over.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about drugs and prisons, the subject of a year-long investigation by the Columbus Dispatch and reporter Laura Bischoff and the Marshall Project Cleveland staff writer Doug Livingston. The money being made is off the charts. Here is one recently incarcerated man named Tim Wade and here's what he told you.
Tim Wade: I know millionaires in prison, actual millionaires who had nothing on the street but came to prison and become rich. I don't think this is ever gonna stop.
Juravich: What about Tim's comment there? I mean, this kind of money, can you really, Doug, can make millions?
Livingston: So this is a claim that we heard over and over again when we started reporting, and I had heard in previous conversations, and it just sounded so wild, like are there people who are really willing to sacrifice their freedom to go into a prison to make a lot of money really quick?
And we heard it over and again, and we talked to current and former workers, I think a former warden, and then we started looking at the amount of money that can be made on one eight and a half by 11 inch sheet of printer paper. And we've seen those be sold for anywhere from like $4,000 to $10,000 for the entire sheet. And then you take that sheet of paper and you chop it into 88 squares, one inch squares, and those squares are then sold.
And then, you take each one of those squares and you can chop it in to 16 or 32 pieces and then each one those pieces can be sold. And so, just like drug dealing on the outside, it's an economy where the smaller the quantity you get, the more profit you get off of it.
And then when you consider that because of the inherent risk of being caught and getting in trouble, the price of these drugs go up more. I mean, this is why when we outlaw drugs on the street, they become more profitable, they cost more money. When it's harder to get drugs into a prison, you find that banning tobacco has led to like a single cigarette being worth more than a single pack of cigarettes on the outside.
So you can get like $20 for a single cigarettes if you chop it into three pieces and sell it. And this paper, just the amounts that we found on just corrections officers who were caught with it in the course of two years, I think we estimated that just their payload was like a million to four million dollars depending on what size and what quantity you're selling comment.
Bischoff: And that was off of like, I think, 20 cases in which the patrol did investigate former officers and vendors.
Livingston: And that's just what they were caught with, too, because a lot of times in those cases, they'll say, all right, we caught you, they'll sit down, they'll confess, and they'll how long you've been smuggling, and they say, well, it's been a few weeks. One person said it was seven months that he had been smuggling before he was caught. So you have to imagine, it's not just what were caught with when they were finally fired or allowed to resign for personal reasons. It's all the smuggling that took place that was never detected.
Juravich: We talked earlier about the drones dropping things into prisons. You interviewed a former drone pilot named Corey Sutfin, who is now incarcerated. In the video that accompanies your series, he talked about how he spent the money he made.
Corey Sutfin: I'd go to the bar and drop $1,000 a night just because I knew tomorrow, hey, I'm making it in four hours. I'm going to make it. I had every pair of Jordans you can have. At one point, I bought me and all my kids 18 karat gold Cuban chains, but then I saw myself as part of the problem. I was literally flooding multiple prisons throughout the state of Ohio with just the worst of drugs.
Juravich: Yeah, Laura, can you talk about, in the video and in the piece about Corey, he feels bad now that he flooded the prisons with drugs. Do you think it was the act of getting caught that made him realize his drone activity harmed people? What did you learn from him? I can't remember whose story that was. Oh, that was my story. There you go.
Bischoff: He has a lot of regrets now and you know he's sober and thinking about his behavior and his actions and the consequences you know being separated from his kids and the rest of it so but his story was pretty incredible he started out as a driver for a smuggling ring and he made 1200 bucks on that first night driving from Columbus to Chillicothe doing drops at the two prisons there and driving back.
And he was going through a divorce and had expenses and the lure of a fast money and free drugs was enormous for him. And he moved his way up and became kind of like a recon guy, zoomed around Ohio on his motorcycle looking for the best places to launch a drone. He got pretty good at the drones. He's the one who, he told me he flew it right to the window.
And at first I thought that was... Know bragging or something but then sure enough DRC had video of a drone going right to windows and he told told us about the you know using a dead carcass of a bird and sticking in chip bags and dropping it on top of a of a building and draping the fishing line over the over the wall so that the person could just you know next day walk into chow go and pull the pull the and retrieve the package.
Livingston: And he did this over a hundred times, made about a hundred thousand dollars over
Bischoff: Yeah, he made like a hundred grand in seven months and in the patrol was able to identify 11 drops at five prisons for Corey Sutfin and his collaborators. But Corey said that they did a hundred, maybe about a hundred drops at about at Lisa does in prisons.
Juravich: And so he was caught and he's serving time now for.
Bischoff: Yeah, one of the drones crashed at Toledo Correctional and the patrol opens it up and they find a card in it with video of Corey's collaborator looking up into the sky, practicing with the drone and they were able to see a plate on a SUV at a neighbor's driveway and that was a major break for the patrol. The patrol spent...
Juravich: Months on this case. We are talking about an investigative series into drugs in Ohio's prisons with reporter Laura Bischoff and Doug Livingston, and they're staying with us. And coming up, we're going to hear from Chris Mabe, president of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, the union representing corrections officers. That is when All Sides continues on 89.7 NPR News.
You're listening to All Sides. I'm your host, Amy Juravich. Drugs flown into prisons are drugs flowing into prisons in ways that are both brazen and clandestine. They're dropped by noisy drones or smuggled in by visitors, vendors, or even corrections officers and other staff. A year-long investigation by the Columbus Dispatch and the Marshall Project Cleveland documented how potent narcotics are addicting and even killing men and women who are supposed to be in prison for rehabilitation. In addition to serving time for their crimes.
Still with us, we have Laura Bischoff, investigative reporter for the Columbus Dispatch. Thanks again for being here, Laura. Thank you. Doug Livingston, staff writer for the Marshall Project Cleveland. Thanks for being her, Doug. Welcome. And also joining us now, we Chris Mabe, president of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association. Welcome to All Sides, Chris. Thank you for having us. So Chris, can you tell us about what your role is? Who do you represent in the prison system? Is it just the corrections officers or others?
Chris Mabe: As OCSEA, we represent the public sector workers inside the prison, which will be correctional officers. We've got some medical staff, we've got support staff when it comes to maintenance, administrative people, so it's not just only corrections, and sergeants, correctional counselors inside the institutions.
Juravich: Okay, well I wanted to get your thoughts on the series. I mean, did you learn anything from the series you weren't aware of? Did it affirm problems you already knew about?
Mabe: It kind of solidified a lot of the problems that we've had I've been with the Department of Corrections since 1990 I start off the Ohio State Reformatory Back in 90 problems that have existed since the dawn of time in correctional facilities It's it's good to see and I really do appreciate all you all working on the project as you have Very insightful learned some things along the way and got to tell some stories along the ways So it has been insightful actually met with our new interim director yesterday. I had some conversations about this very issue that I would be willing to share, so.
Juravich: Okay. Yeah. I hadn't realized the interim director was, uh, was announced with that happened yesterday.
Mabe: Well, yeah, he's not interim director yet, but Mr. Banks is the assistant director.
Juravich: Oh, I see. And so, OK, so the governor point, there's an interim director since the since the director moved to a different job. OK, So what? Tell me something that you talked about that you'd like to see change.
Mabe: Well, you know, we always talk about the staffing levels inside the institution, which is always a major problem. I mean, we've had body cameras inside the facilities. Body cameras kind of record violence. They don't really help stop violence or find drugs or stop in that process. But staffing is always an issue inside our facilities because if you don't have enough people to find these issues.
You did talk about resources earlier. Thank you both very much. We don't enough investigators. I think dealing and talking with Mr. Banks yesterday, trying to use more technology. As far as artificial intelligence and some of the technologies available now, using the tablets that inmates are using, the telephone calls, screening those things. I mean, back in the day, as a mailroom officer, mailroom screener, you had to physically read all of these documents coming in and pass them out to each individual inmate. Those things are being, you know, assisted with the use of technology to try to drill those things down.
So, looking at some of those. The disciplinary issues we have inside the facilities, how we not only control inmates' behaviors, more treatment inside the facility, it's just hard to keep people working along the way. We still have the largest inmate population in the state since my tenure started in 1990, and still some of the lowest staffing levels. When I talk about staffing, I'm not just talking about correctional officers, I'm talking about the support staffs too. And we've been back and forth when it comes to mental health and keeping people engaged. And you said it, it is one of the toughest grinds in state employment.
Juravich: The investigation that was done, the year-long investigation, found that corrections officers are having to deal with unprecedented levels of rules violations. From 2020 to 2024, the records show that rule violations for drug use and possession doubled from 10,000 to 20,000. But there's only been an uptick of 6% of the state prison population. So, can you speak to that doubling of having to deal with drug use?
Mabe: I think it goes back to what Doug talked about earlier. You have a contained environment of drug users and drug dealers. I mean, it makes the perfect storm in the economy. But they took away smoking and cigarettes inside the institutions years ago. I think we started seeing an uptick in those types of items since then.
A lot of various reasons, I think. The availability, the transportation. We've got more visitors. And when I say visitors, I'm talking about more contractors, more people coming in from the streets that we've ever had. We allow more people frequently inside our prisons that aren't state employees or public sector employees for other programming that may or may not be necessary in the institutions. But the more people you let in that aren't vetted or aren't screened, the more availability of those transportation modes of narcotics getting in. So if you look back in history at the data, the data will show you as those numbers increased, so did the amounts of drugs in the institution.
Bischoff: Go ahead, Laura. Oh, I was going to ask you a question. We were talking about technology and the use of technology. What about, you know, DRC bought these airport-style x-ray scanners and they use them on incarcerated people when they come back from visits or court dates or what have you. Why aren't those used on employees if they're safe for people? Why not use those? This is a matter of, you, know, a lot of drugs are coming in via employees. And this is a workplace safety issue, so.
Mabe: Number one, airport security and safety, as far as those scanners, we still have questions about it. Number two, a lot of the scanners people have a misconception of what they will detect. I mean, you're talking about some of these papers that are basically a quarter size of a postage stamp. And then once again, you have the staff resources because those systems don't always detect and stopping. We're not against those types of technologies, but once again if you're gonna put money into technology or people, sometimes we've got to have more people on the ground than we have to technological means to stop them.
Juravich: Wouldn't it benefit the corrections officers to go through the scanner because then you'll know everyone working that day was scanned and they're there to do their job and not something else.
Mabe: We do go through metal detectors. We have our personal belongings scanned through scanning systems going in. I don't think anybody's opposed to it, but like I said, putting money in technology and resources, we have to balance what those costs are along the way. I don't think that anybody's saying that we're against it. I think that we need to be cognizant of utilization of resources all the way, it's like you said once before, there's so many venues of how to get things in.
If you look at the data, we're a data-driven organization. If you look at the data on how many people are bringing things in as opposed to other means and methodologies that they're bringing it in, you got to kind of put values in that because even though we just went through the budget last year with the state of Ohio, we had a budget that's massive in the state and getting money for those resources out of the legislature is almost impossible.
Juravich: So I'm confused. I don't mean to harp on this, but do they go through scanners or do they not go through?
Mabe: We go we go through metal detectors inside our institutions. We have scanners just like you go through the airport as far as your your lunch All your personal equipment your baggage goes through an airport ish scanner As you would have the airport we don't go through a body scanning device at the institutions of present time I do use them for the inmates going in and out to court
Bischoff: Sure, but you know, there are thousands of people coming in and out of the prisons for work every single day, and they're not going to be bringing in the confetti-sized piece of paper. They're going to bring in the eight-and-a-half by 11 piece of paper, and it's going to be tucked into their underwear or their socks or their pants or what have you. And you know when you go to the airport, TSA will make you go through one of the Why not use that kind of technology to prevent the large-scale smuggling by employees?
Mabe: I want to be clear, I'm not discrediting what you're saying, but the two things you're talking about is people bringing things on their body. If we concentrate on what persons are bringing on their bodies, they still have their equipment that are going through. The body scanner, we have people that are bringing documents in every day, as far as staff, administrative people, wardens, deputies. They're still going to send those items through this other scanner.
Now unless you have devices and detection that detect those chemicals on those papers, That's what I'm talking about, weighing cost versus resources. If you're scanning the person, I simply have to put everything on my paper, or my books, or my contract, or whatever I'm going to do, and bring it into the facility. Because if you don't have those detection devices that detect those chemicals, then it's kind of a zero-sum gain. That's what I'm saying.
We have two different things happening at one time. You have people going through a body scanner. I'm really probably not going to take a little piece of paper and put it in my pocket when I have a whole binder of documents that I'm legitimately allowed to bring into the institution, and we don't have the devices that are available to find those. We're not bringing. People are not bringing large amounts of marijuana and things that are easily detected by drug dogs. And a lot of our drug dogs, I don't think that anything is capable of sensing these chemicals on these papers. That's kind of what I'm saying.
Livingston: Sounds like the x-ray scanners are using on incarcerated people are even outdated at this point. We're not able to detect the problem
Mabe: I think there is a problem with that, and like I said, if we don't have the detection methods that actually identify through SENT or through other technological means, it's kind of a zero-sum game. It will find some, just as if the airports find some. But even going through TSA, there's been many times I go to Body Scanner, and they're backed up because you have large amounts of people coming in at simultaneous times. You've got contractors, you've got employees.
And controlling how much and how many people we led in the institution. Number one, you have to slow down the process sometimes to make sure things are secure because safety and security is utmost for us. People's health and safety, and that's both staff and incarcerated individuals. We're trying to take care of everybody in the institutions. And that's why a lot of times we concentrate on staffing levels inside the institutions as opposed to some of the technologies.
Cause like I said, there was a big push for body cameras years ago. They record the violence, but they don't actually stop it. So we actually have to be smart and strategic about what things we're going to use and how we're gonna use them. And sometimes that's policy-driven and not just equipment-driven, if it makes sense.
Juravich: You're listening to All Sides on 89.7 NPR News. We're talking about drugs and prisons, and it's the subject of a year-long investigation by the Columbus Dispatch and the Marshall Project Cleveland. With us is Laura Bischoff from the Dispach and Doug Livingston from the Marshall project. Also with us is Chris Mabe, president of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association. Earlier we talked about former Corrections Officer Barbara Devine. She's serving time for. Smuggling in drugs, but not everyone does. There's reporting that said that if they resign, some corrections officers can resign without facing any charges. What do you know about that? What's the union's position on what happens to your members when they get caught doing something?
Mabe: When people are investigated, when they're caught in these actions, I mean, number one, prosecution is not up to the organization. We don't defend people that are guilty of bringing drugs inside the institutions, and I'll make sure that's made perfectly clear. But prosecution is up to us. That's up to each local county, municipality, wherever the case may be. Our goal is to get people out of the prisons that are doing bad things, and the judicial system will handle the rest. I am not the judge or jury of any of them. And we don't condone.
I see, and I have seen in my history in 30 years, how people get engaged with these things. It goes back to staffing. When you're working in a block of 250 inmates alone and you have no partner, a lot of people fall prey. They fall prey to conversations. There's been a line in the Department of Corrections for years when I first hired in. There was a line, there was inmates, and there was staff, and there is no crossing of this line.
And the more we progress in time and technology and policy, the correctional officers, not only now, the security, the mother, the father, the counselor, the drug addiction counselor, all these jobs, and the more you have conversations with people crossing those lines, the more comfortable people be. And even talking with inmates, we always try to tell new employees and employee orientations, don't get comfortable, don't tell them about your personal life.
The department started allowing cell phones in with employees years ago, which we really didn't agree with because those are security things that we don't believe should be inside the institution. So employees bringing them in, catching casual conversations. Inmates are always listening and they're trying to build a rapport with people.
And if you're a female or a male inside a facility, you're having problems on the street and you're working alone in a block. Those guys and girls are consistently probing you to see what they can learn from you and form those relationships. And sometimes people fall prey to that. Is that an excuse for what they do? Absolutely not. But that's sort of the mechanisms that are in place that happen. These guys have 24-7, 365 days to pick targets, inside an enclosed encapsulated facility and work them.
Juravich: We're running short on time, but I did want to ask you about the, the investigation found a list of 335 state employees, mostly corrections officers who were not recommended for rehire, but no reason was given. Do you know why, or do you find that unusual?
Mabe: You know, there's various reasons that they are recommended for an over rehire. Some of them are dealing with narcotics probably inside the institutions. If we don't have anything, if they do a resignation, we don't have a grievance process that we file into. We don't a pre-dismissive investigation that we have to deal with. So a lot of those times we don't know. When somebody resigns, it's out of our hands as an organization. The only time that we would have purview is if they were removed and we wind up filing a grievances on the removal. So that's our process.
Juravich: In the story, you're quoted as calling it an infestation of narcotics. So you talked about seeing it grow from the 90s till now. You talked a little bit about what you want to see done. What do you think is the best next step to stop the prevalence of all of these drugs in prisons?
Mabe: Well, I don't know that, and I hate to be defeatist about this, I don't know we'll ever stop narcotics inside the institutions. I think there's policies and processes we can hopefully gain more intel. I think as technology increases and we start using those and encapsulating data better, we can identify quicker who is bringing and who is dealing with. Everything inside the institution is being monitored, as they should be.
But we don't have enough people, so these are the times you have to rely on technology. The policies in place, if we have people that are in this, you know, discussing with Director Banks or Assistant Director Banks yesterday, if we had people that can a consistent Narcan that we have to give Narcan or consistent in our drug rehabilitative programs, maybe we need to isolate some of their visits and move to some non-contact visits. Pay stricter attention to who they're dealing with and who they are around. We don't have the space to basically, our segregation as a prison within a prison, we don't space to lock everybody up that does these things, nor would we, because it's counterintuitive and counterproductive.
Juravich: We're gonna have to leave it there. That's Chris Mabe, President of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association. I wanna say thank you to Columbus Dispatch reporter, Laura Bischoff. Thanks for being here, Laura. Hey, thank you. Marshall Project Cleveland staff writer, Doug Livingston. Thanks, Doug. Thanks, Amy. And Chris, thanks for being her today as well. And you can find the series at the Columbus Dispatch website and at the Marshall Project, Cleveland website. This has been All Sides on 89.7 NPR News.