By Aaron C. Davis
Washington Post
BALTIMORE, Md. — As a young city prosecutor, then a council member, then mayor and then governor, Martin O’Malley has had to contend with the crowded, mismanaged and ultimately corrupt Baltimore City Detention Center.
On Thursday, the Maryland General Assembly will begin probing what federal authorities say has been a years-long failure of leadership under the Maryland governor.
O’Malley (D) ran for governor on the promise that he would improve conditions in the Maryland prison system. Over more than six years as Maryland’s top elected official — a post he won in part with a crime-fighting reputation — he amassed a flurry of statistics, such as falling rates of violence behind bars.
But according to a federal indictment unsealed this spring, O’Malley’s statistics of progress masked a broken state disciplinary system that allowed more than a dozen female corrections officers to go to work for a violent prison gang with little or no fear of reprisal.
The corrections officers smuggled drugs, cellphones and money into the jail, according to prosecutors, and four of them even had children with a single incarcerated gang member. The largest state-run jail served not as a place of punishment, prosecutors said, but as a haven for members of the Black Guerrilla Family. And from inside the decrepit, 200-year-old jail, the gang amassed cash and cachet that allowed it to spread onto the streets of Baltimore.
Aides said O’Malley does not plan to attend Thursday’s hearing. But lawmakers’ questioning of Gary D. Maynard, his corrections secretary, could shed light on how much O’Malley knew about the jail’s most recent troubles, and when.
Full story: For Gov. O’Malley, Md. jail scandal caps years of trouble with Baltimore facility