PHILADELPHIA (AP) — The chief of the Philadelphia Department of Prisons is leaving the job after a series of inmate deaths and escapes.
Blanche Carney, who has overseen the city's four prisons and jails since 2016, told staffers in a letter on Monday that her last day will be April 5, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported. A department spokesperson confirmed Carney's impending retirement.
The city's lockups have been dealing with surging violence and the escape of four inmates in a span of six months last year.
The Pennsylvania Prison Society, a group that monitor's the state's prisons, interviewed nearly 50 inmates in Philadelphia last year and issued a report that documented the "dangerous and degrading conditions in the Philadelphia prisons." The report said that inmates were confined to "rat-infested, caged areas, with insufficient food and insufficient healthcare for weeks or months at a time while their mental health deteriorates." Ten inmates died in 2022, according to the report.
The Philadelphia correctional officers union cast a unanimous "no confidence" vote in Carney last year, asserting the facilities were understaffed and in "chaos."
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Carney, the first woman to serve as prisons commissioner, acknowledged the problems in her letter to prisons staff, saying the pandemic had "caused a tremendous strain on correctional operations worldwide."
