Let me preface this post with one solid fact: I know a bunch of good, solid, correctional officers. People that I am proud to call my friends. People that I would go to the ground with or for. I also, without a doubt, know a bunch of pieces of shit that should never wear a uniform, carry a pistol or shotgun or “guard” anyone. Rehabilitation is a sham (scam?) and only happens when you decide it happens. I used to say that the wrong ones were on the wrong side of the bars!
But, there ARE good folks working there. I count to this day a couple of wardens, some colonels, some majors, some captains and a lot of sergeants that I’d be happy to go to dinner with. I also know a bunch that I’d love to see at WalMart running to get away from me.
What you know is what you know, and what you know is what you can talk about credibly.
So, let’s talk about COs. “Correctional Officers.” Now, I’ll be honest here…this experience is inspired by a piece that the Marshall Project just did on cops that were allowed to be hired by other jurisdictions after being exposed and fired in other jurisdictions for intentional cruelty or haphazard denials or even wose, homicides. They are known as “wandering cops” and you occasionally read about them in a newspaper or see them on the news.
But, wait....what about wandering COs? “COs” you might ask. But, they’re not cops, so what’s the big deal? Well, yes and no. Here’s a definition of a CO and their normal duties:
Core Duties and Responsibilities
Maintain security: Patrol cell blocks, monitor facility perimeters, and prevent disturbances, fights, or escapes.
Enforce rules: Ensure inmates follow facility regulations and conduct routine security checks or cell searches for contraband.
Supervise movement: Oversee daily inmate movement during meals, recreation, work assignments, and court transport.
Document behavior: Write incident reports and log daily activities regarding inmate conduct and progress.
Qualifications and Requirements
Age: Must usually be at least 18 to 21 years old depending on the agency.
Education: Typically requires a high school diploma or GED; federal or specialized roles may require college credits or a degree.
Background: Must pass a thorough background check, physical fitness test, and drug screening.
Training: Complete a designated corrections or police standards training academy.
So, there ya’ go. That’s what Webster and other sources tell you that COs do and what their job requirements are.
What do they really do? ALL kinds of shit! Now, I totally get it that they put up with all kinds of BS on a daily basis. Look at who you’re dealing with. Look at what you’re dealing with. So, I give some passes here and there.
POST Training, for one. And the thing is, when they undergo POST training, they’re taught about all of the things that, quite often, result in their firing, resignations or charges.
The David C. Knapps Training Academy is the new employee’s first stop. Whether he/she makes it out of there or not depends upon their abilities, their fitness and their willingness. I’ve personally seen some guys that actually shone during their training. I have ALSO seen a phone call made from a warden to the Training Academy to “no matter what, PASS this guy!” because “the guy” was related to a Parish President.
Years ago, a convict I knew used to actually teach a class on shakedown procedures at the Academy! I guess they figured that a convict who had been in the system a long time and knew almost everything about how it worked was the best one to teach how to conduct a proper and correct shakedown of a convict. WHAT?
Oh, I’ve got some doozies of stories about shakedowns! And, some doozies of stories about other stuff!
Louisiana produces plenty of reports when correctional officers are arrested, fired, suspended, or allowed to resign. What is much harder to find is where those employees go next. There is no easily searchable public record that follows a correctional employee from a state prison to a parish jail, from one sheriff’s office to another, or from a public institution into a private prison. Or, from a private prison to a state facility.
A “wandering officer” is usually understood as a police officer who leaves one department under a cloud - sometimes fired, sometimes permitted to resign before discipline is completed - and then turns up wearing another badge somewhere else.
The same thing can happen behind prison walls:
A correctional officer can resign while an investigation is still open, leave before misconduct is formally sustained, and apply elsewhere as an experienced officer rather than as someone who left the last job under investigation.
The uniform may change. The title may change from correctional officer to deputy, jailer, detention officer, juvenile specialist, transport officer, or facility administrator. But the power and authority over confined and helpless people remains.
WBRZ’s June 2026 investigation is the strongest current account of widespread employee misconduct at a Louisiana prison. By June 16, the station had documented 14 employee arrests connected to Elayn Hunt Correctional Center during 2026 alone.
Most of the female employees arrested were accused of communicating improperly with incarcerated men; two were accused of sexual relationships. Major Francis Smith was arrested for alleged malfeasance involving a relationship with an incarcerated man. A former employee told WBRZ that the relationship had been reported to management well before the arrest. The investigation reportedly began in 2025, but Smith was not arrested until after a new warden arrived in 2026. Another former officer, Juanaya Spiller, was accused of attempting to bring drug-soaked paper into the prison and having a loaded firearm in a vehicle.
Why it matters: This is not a wandering-officer case by itself. It is evidence of something that makes wandering possible: allegations can circulate inside an institution for months or longer - before producing formal action. During that period, an employee may resign, transfer, or begin looking elsewhere. The department is usually relieved to “close” an investigation.
It also undercuts the “one bad apple” defense. Fourteen arrests at one institution in approximately six months suggest a failure of supervision, reporting, screening, or institutional culture - not merely fourteen unrelated personal lapses. I can personally attest to the fact that it is definitely an institutional culture. During my 47 years of prison, I served about 4 years at Hunt. Neither of the 2 times I was there, was it fun!
In March 2019, seven Angola employees resigned after a Department of Corrections investigation into sexual relationships, improper communications, and contraband smuggling. Four were arrested, while the report said charges remained pending against three others.
Among them were correctional officers Sarah Veals and Precious Fitzgerald. Both reportedly admitted improper relationships with incarcerated men, resigned immediately, and had charges pending when the article was published. Six of the correctional officers involved held the rank of sergeant.
Why it matters: This article reveals the opening through which a wandering CO can escape scrutiny. The employee leaves immediately; the criminal and administrative processes continue - or sometimes quietly “stall” - after the employment relationship has ended.
The unanswered questions are precisely the ones should raise:
Were their POST records flagged?
Did the resignations become formal findings?
Were nearby sheriff’s offices or private facilities notified?
Were any of these employees later hired in another custodial position?
Who was responsible for checking?
The published story tells us how they left Angola. It does not tell us where they went afterward or who opened the door and welcomed them in.
Four former supervisory officers at Angola - Daniel Davis, Scotty Kennedy, John Sanders, and James Savoy Jr.—were sentenced in 2020 for participating in the beating of a handcuffed, shackled, nonresisting prisoner and conspiring to conceal it.
Federal prosecutors said Davis pulled the prisoner’s leg chains and caused him to fall face-first onto concrete. Officers then punched, kicked, and stomped him, causing broken ribs, a collapsed lung, a dislocated shoulder, and other injuries. The officers subsequently created a false explanation, falsified reports, tampered with witnesses, and lied under oath.
Why it matters: These were not inexperienced employees or cadets who briefly lost control. They were supervisors, and the wrongdoing extended beyond the violence itself and flooded into the institutional paperwork and the oblivion that it provides. I can’t even begin to tell you the number of times I’ve seen “paperwork” cover BS up. That matters enormously to the wandering-CO question: a future employer depends upon the previous employer’s records. When officers and supervisors falsify those records, the misconduct can effectively disappear.
The most directly relevant Louisiana document I found is a federal settlement governing the state’s secure juvenile facilities.
Under that agreement, Louisiana was required to maintain a central registry and a Multiple Allegation Database recording complaints, investigation results, and discipline involving staff. Before hiring someone, facilities were required to consult facility records and the central registry. Facilities were prohibited from knowingly hiring someone whose substantiated abuse had resulted in termination or resignation to avoid being terminated.
The agreement also required Louisiana to retain allegation records for five years after the employee left and to review staff members who accumulated multiple allegations within a two-year period.
This agreement was limited to secure juvenile facilities and should not be presented as proof of how every adult prison or parish jail operates today. But it is enormously valuable to the argument because it shows that federal authorities recognized the precise danger we are talking about here:
An abusive employee must not be allowed to resign from one institution and quietly become someone else’s problem.
Louisiana POST now recognizes Level 2 and Level 3 correctional-officer certifications. Its published rules say certification proceedings may address excessive force, dishonesty, neglect of duty, misuse of authority, termination for cause, and resignation while under investigation or in lieu of termination.
That is encouraging, but there is a catch. The POST process generally depends upon misconduct being formally investigated, documented, and referred. A resignation does not, by itself, produce a public career history explaining every unresolved complaint. An employee may also move among positions that are described differently by state prisons, sheriff-operated jails, juvenile facilities, contractors, and private prison companies.
So Louisiana appears to possess some of the machinery needed to put a STOP to “wandering officers.”
What the public cannot easily determine is whether every agency consistently feeds complete and timely information into that machinery. And, how much does the “old boy” network have to do with whether it gets in there or not?
An Associated Press–Howard Center investigation found that Brandon Spillman was hired by the Avoyelles Parish Sheriff’s Office after previously being fired by the New Roads Police Department. Spillman later participated in a struggle during which he attempted to apply a chokehold to Armando Frank. Frank’s death was ruled a homicide caused by respiratory compromise, although the resulting civil case was dismissed after the court found that the officers had immunity.
Spillman was acting as a law-enforcement officer rather than a conventional prison CO, so I would not mislabel him. But his case demonstrates the Louisiana mechanism perfectly: one agency removes an officer, another agency hires him, and the earlier red flag does not prevent a later use-of-force death.
That institutional overlap matters in Louisiana because sheriff’s offices often operate the parish jails. The same agency may employ patrol deputies, jail deputies, transport officers, and correctional personnel. The line between a wandering cop and a wandering CO is not always as clear as officials might like the public to believe.
Investigative journalist Beth Shelburne (at Moth To Flame, on Substack) documented three senior officials who moved from the troubled, privately operated Trousdale Turner Correctional Center in Tennessee into high-level positions with the deeply troubled Alabama Department of Corrections.
The most striking case is Jermaris Porter. (This is a must-read!) Alabama hired Porter in 2025 and placed him in a facility-administrator position. A pending civil lawsuit alleged that, while working for CoreCivic, Porter participated in a prison drug-smuggling operation, had gang connections, and had previously been dismissed for contraband before being reinstated. Porter’s former warden, Vince Vantell, who was also named in the lawsuit, was subsequently hired by Alabama. A federal judge had denied a motion to dismiss the claims, finding them sufficiently plausible to proceed, but they remained allegations in unresolved civil litigation - not proven criminal findings.
A third former Trousdale administrator, Keith Huggins, was hired by Alabama in April 2026 while named in separate litigation alleging that prison administrators allowed gang members to rape and extort an incarcerated man. Again, those are civil allegations and must be described as such.
The Justice Department had already opened a civil-rights investigation into Trousdale in August 2024, citing state audits, dangerous understaffing, violence, sexual abuse, drug trafficking concerns, and an extraordinary turnover rate. DOJ emphasized that it had not yet reached final conclusions, but the investigation was public before Alabama made at least some of these hires.
Why it matters: This is almost a textbook example of the wandering-CO argument -not cadets or sergeants quietly moving between neighboring jails, but senior private-prison officials moving into highly paid state positions while serious civil allegations and federal institutional investigations remained unresolved.
Alabama’s newly created “site administrator” classification made the pathway even more troubling. Shelburne reported that these administrators were exempt from the ordinary merit system and were not required by the statute to possess Alabama corrections or law-enforcement certification.
The Associated Press reported that Walker County Sheriff Nick Smith was indicted for allegedly hiring six people - one deputy, four armed school-resource officers, and one jailer - without required state certification or training.
One of the hired officers had previously had his Arizona certification suspended after admitting that he pointed a gun at a woman’s head during a traffic stop. He was hired provisionally in Alabama and allegedly made arrests and investigated deaths despite restrictions on what a provisional officer could do. The chief deputy was separately accused of giving false information to Alabama’s standards-and-training commission concerning the officer’s employment status. These were charges and allegations, not convictions.
Alabama Appleseed obtained records showing that the Department of Corrections fired 366 employees between January 2018 and November 2023. At least 19 had been charged with work-related crimes, but Appleseed stressed that the figure excluded employees who resigned before being fired. The Equal Justice Initiative had separately identified at least 89 Alabama corrections employees criminally charged or administratively sanctioned since 2019, including 30 supervisors.
The report also described officer Jesse Cobb, who remained employed in a non-contact position while facing a felony assault indictment in connection with the alleged beating of a 74-year-old incarcerated man with a broom handle. Court records showed earlier arrests and convictions involving intoxication and leaving an accident scene. The matter illustrates retention despite accumulated warning signs rather than movement to a new jurisdiction, but the institutional problem is the same: serious red flags do not necessarily end a correctional career.
A national Associated Press investigation found that correctional employees accused of sexual abuse frequently resign or retire before internal investigations are completed. Without a sustained finding or accessible paper trail, some are transferred, hired by other prisons, or placed in positions involving juveniles and other vulnerable people.
One officer examined by the AP, James Widen, obtained a correctional position in West Virginia after resigning from an Ohio women’s prison following an internal investigation involving improper contact with an incarcerated woman. Widen disputed the implication of sexual misconduct and offered a different explanation for his resignation, but the case demonstrates how an unresolved history can follow an officer across state lines without necessarily barring the next job. He later settled the case.
Another national investigation found that Jerry Burns was hired as a Tennessee deputy after violating a “zero tolerance” policy while employed as a Kentucky jailer. Four months after his new hiring, he participated in a use-of-force incident in which a man’s head was slammed onto concrete; the death was classified as a homicide, and the family’s lawsuit was later settled.
The wandering-officer problem does not stop at the prison gate.
In fact, it may be harder to detect in corrections because the officer moves through a fragmented and broken network of state prisons, parish jails, sheriff’s departments, juvenile institutions, private contractors, and out-of-state facilities. A CO can leave under one title and return under another. A pending investigation can become separated from the personnel file. A resignation can occur before a finding is entered. A new employer desperate for experienced staff (almost all state prisons are short-staffed and overworked) may see prior service and experience - not the unresolved misconduct - as the most important qualification.
The strongest Louisiana finding is presently not a long, verified list of wandering COs. I could not responsibly and credibly produce such a list from published reporting alone. Instead, I found:
repeated mass resignations and arrests;
employees leaving while charges or investigations remained pending;
proven violence and coordinated cover-ups;
a historical federal order requiring Louisiana to create exactly the type of cross-facility registry needed to prevent wandering abusive staff;
and a current certification system that can address resignation under investigation, but whose operation is difficult for the public to follow.
That absence of a traceable public employment history should not be mistaken for proof that wandering does not occur. It is evidence that Louisiana has made the movement exceedingly difficult to see, and to follow up on.
If you don’t know what to look for, how can you combat it?
And that’s one thing I always do, is combat it!
Prison work assignments used to lure and rape female inmates. Guards sometimes walk free
Alabama sheriff arrested for hiring uncertified officers, including one accused of violence
These police officers had red flags in their past, then used force in a case that ended in death
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