Brickbat: From Officer to Inmate

Avery Richard Smith, a former corrections officer in Berkeley County, South Carolina, has been sentenced to 10 years in prison—the maximum—after pleading guilty to four counts of first-degree assault and battery, five counts of third-degree assault and battery, and two counts of misconduct in office. His victims included at least nine inmates under his supervision and at least one subordinate.

Comments

[Don't look at me! (No longer muted!)]

I’m sure he will serve his sentence without incident.

[Vernon Depner]

It's a start...

[Fist of Etiquette]

Should not have put all those nails in front of him.

[Fist of Etiquette]

The clumsy parenthesis in the first sentence of the linked article. Maybe we do need Skynet writing our news stories after all.

[Fist of Etiquette]

Just one year earlier, Smith stood in a green and yellow detention center uniform — proudly accepting his 2023 Detention Deputy of the Year award for “exemplary performance” at the Hill-Finklea Detention Center...

Classic.

[Fist of Etiquette]

But Smith, the son of Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) Lieutenant Damien Smith, failed to uphold the family legacy.

This one's cliches all the way down.

[Fist of Etiquette]

As a result, SLED charged Dozier—the brother of former BCSO Deputy Ronitto Dozier—and Snider, a senior pastor at a church in Northwoods Mall, with two counts of misconduct in office.

Stop. It's too much.

[Chumby]

If the former corrections officer is caucasian, he should serve additional time.

[Bubba Jones]

ICE is hiring.

[Your Therapist]

At first I thought they might be talking about Sevo with his barbed wire wrapped broomstick and bag of glue around his neck but then I noticed Sevo is still posting here at reason so I’m guessing he’s still out on the streets.

[AT]

I keep telling you, the problem is that we're stuck in the paradigm of a prison system that is decades obsolete.

Between wearable tech for biometric health monitoring, videoconferencing that we all learned was VERY easy during the scamdemic for everything from visitations to attorney conferences to court appearances, virtual learning, digital/streaming entertainment media, teledoc - there is NO reason whatsoever to let the inmates out of their single-occupancy cells.

THAT'S the fundamental problem. That's what allows for every potential abuse from guards to gangs.

Open the door, put them in, and then the timelock won't open the door again until their sentence is up - unless overridden, in person, by a judge or onsite-doctor (for parole or emergencies, respectively). Top of the line surgical suite for the latter, so the inmate doesn't have to leave the prison for even the most extreme of procedures.

Meals to order (from a regular menu, obviously) under the door, same with toiletries and linens and medications, full shower/toilet/sink rig, a nice big window for sun and fresh air (the prisons will be built vertically, with cells starting on the 6th floor and a sheer drop beneath inmate windows).

Video monitoring 24/7 by guard staff that never actually comes into physical contact with them beyond intake and release.

Leave them in the cells. ALL the problems with prisons is because we don't leave them in the cells. ALL of them.