COLUMBIA, S.C. — A supervisor who managed security at a South Carolina prison accepted more than $219,000 in bribes over three years and obtained 173 smuggled cellphones for inmates, federal prosecutors said.
Christine Mary Livingston, 46, was indicted earlier this month on 15 charges, including bribery, conspiracy, bank fraud and money laundering.
Livingston worked for the South Carolina Department of Corrections for 16 years. She was promoted to captain at Broad River Correctional Institution in 2016, putting her in charge of security at Columbia’s medium-security prison, investigators said.
Livingston worked with an inmate, 33-year-old Jerell Reaves, to accept bribes for cell phones and other contraband accessories. According to the federal indictment unsealed Thursday, they allegedly received between $1,000 and $7,000 through the smartphone Cash App for a phone money transfer program.
Reaves was known as Hell Rell and Livingston was known as Hell Rell’s Queen, federal prosecutors said.
Both face up to 20 years in prison, a $250,000 fine and an order to repay the money they earned illegally if convicted.
Reaves is serving a 15-year prison sentence for voluntary manslaughter in the shooting death of a man at a Marion County supermarket in 2015.
Attorneys for Livingston and Reaves did not respond to emails Friday.
Smuggled cellphones in South Carolina prisons have long been a problem. Corrections director Bryan Stirling said inmates have been running drug rings, setting up fraud schemes and even ordering murders behind bars.
A 2018 riot that left seven inmates dead at Lee Correctional Intuition was sparked by cellphones.
“This woman has betrayed the public trust in South Carolina, making our prisons less safe for inmates, staff and the community. We will absolutely not tolerate officers and staff bringing contraband into our prisons, and I am pleased she is being held accountable,” Stirling said in a statement.
The South Carolina prison system has begged federal officials to let them jam cellphone signals in prisons, but has not received permission.
They recently had success with a device that identifies all cell phones on prison grounds, allowing employees to request cell phone companies to block the unauthorized numbers, although Stirling’s agency has not received enough funding to expand it beyond a pilot program for one prison.
In January, Stirling posted a video of a frustrated inmate calling a tech support hotline when his phone stopped working and the employee asked, “What can I do to turn it back on?” and was told to call a Department of Corrections hotline.
From July 2022 to June 2023, state prison officials issued 2,179 violations against inmates in possession of prohibited communications devices, and more than 35,000 cellphones have been recovered since 2015. The prison system has approximately 16,000 inmates.
Stirling has pushed for the General Assembly to pass a bill specifying that cellphones are illegal in prisons rather than being included in a broad category of contraband. years for a second offense.
That bill did not make it out of the Senate Judiciary Committee.