I have a cousin (actually, the son of a cousin) who was employed as a prison guard in rural Ohio.

I’ll refrain from publishing his name here. He was fired recently after he and another guard beat the living daylights out of a prisoner who was handcuffed. For reasons that I will never understand, he was not prosecuted.

I called his mother when a third relative forwarded to me news reports about the incident that were published in the local newspaper. The mother’s only response was, “Well, at least he wasn’t smuggling drugs into the prison!” Shame on all of them.

With that said, there is a lot of reporting in the criminal justice media about prison and jail guards who use violence against prisoners, often maiming or killing them. Indeed, I’ve written about these cases many times, including here, here, and here. But there isn’t a lot of reporting in that same media about drugs in American prisons, even though the problem is at an epidemic level.

I have written extensively about that problem, of drugs in American prisons. But I’m still mystified why nobody does anything about it. Sure, we’ve all heard the stories, probably apocryphal, about prison guards falling sick while sorting mail in the prison mailroom because the envelopes, stamps, paper, whatever, were soaked in liquified drugs.

But that certainly wasn’t my experience in prison. My experience was that, sure, there were a lot of drugs available. But every one of them was brought into the facility by the guards.

My family one weekend came to visit me in prison. At the end of every visit, like all prisoners, I was comprehensively strip searched before being allowed to return to my cell. I stripped down and said dismissively to the guard, “So you have butthole duty today. Your parents must be so proud.”

He didn’t take the bait, but instead responded, “How do you think all these drugs get in here.” I said,

“Oh, come on. There are four guards in the visiting room, along with a dozen cameras. And every other prisoner is a rat for you guys. You want me to believe that a visitor goes through security, then pulls a bag of drugs out of her vagina, hands it to one of us, we put the bag in our rear ends, and then smuggle it into the prison, all in plain view? Or do you guys just do it yourselves.”

He didn’t like that response, and the conversation solved nothing. But it has long stuck in my mind.

A Litany of Cases

The truth is that that is exactly how drugs get into American prisons. The guards bring them in. Just take a look at the following sampling from the latest issue of Prison Legal News magazine:

• Earlier this month, prosecutors in Maryland announced that they had charged three prison guards with smuggling MDMA pills, fentanyl, marijuana, and methamphetamine into the Jessup Correctional Institution. They now face decades in prison.
• In Kentucky last month, prison guard Billy Williams was arrested and charged with first-degree promoting contraband for bringing thousands of dollars worth of contraband, including methamphetamine, into the prison in exchange for bribes from prisoners’ families.
• The library coordinator at the Bristol County House of Corrections in Massachusetts was arrested and charged last month with smuggling drugs, including liquified synthetic THC-like drug K2, into the facility in what the local sheriff called “the biggest drug bust in the prison’s history,” indicating that there had been others in the past. Librarian Ginger Houk was caught on surveillance video spraying legal paperwork with liquified K2 for distribution to prisoners.
• In August, Michigan prison guard Jeilon Banks was arrested after being caught smuggling drugs into the Saginaw County Jail. Banks was charging prisoners $1,000 per contraband delivery. He was finally caught after surveillance video showed him bringing drugs into the jail, delivering them to prisoners, and accepting payment.
• Hudson County New Jersey prison guard Marquis Santiago was arrested in October for conspiring with two prisoners to bring K2 into the prison. Prosecutors later added a second charge of conspiracy to introduce cocaine into the prison.
• In October, a guard and a nurse at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown were arrested and charged with conspiring to smuggle drugs into the facility. Nurse Jodi Johnson and guard Brenda Dixson were caught red-handed bringing bags containing methamphetamine, marijuana, tobacco, and vape pens into the prison.
• South Carolina prison guard John Meyers was charged in October with smuggling fentanyl and marijuana, drug scales, vape pens and other contraband into the Dorchester County Prison. He faces more than ten years in prison.
• And in Tennessee, jail guard Michael Zackey was arrested and charged with smuggling suboxone into the Monroe County Jail, where he sold the pills to prisoners for $300 each. He was the small jail’s third guard to be charged with smuggling just in 2025.

The smuggling of drugs and other contraband into prisons and jails across the country is obviously widespread. It points to a host of problems in the prison and jail “industry,” including a lack of oversight and the low quality of people hired as guards, at least.

But lest you think that all guards who are arrested for smuggling are drug dealers, think again. Travis County Texas prison guard Amos Nyanway was arrested in October and charged with smuggling. It wasn’t drugs that he was sneaking into the prison, however.

It was barbeque chicken wings.

Chicken is immensely popular in prison. I don’t know why. The chickens that we were fed were so scrawny that they probably couldn’t have even produced a broth. But Nyanway apparently had a good side business going, selling thousands of dollars worth of chicken wings.

He is now awaiting trial — in the same prison where he once worked.

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