Corrections officers break prison drug code
Posted at: 02/03/2012 6:05 PM
By: Mike Daniels, KOB Eyewitness News 4
 Eric Gonzalez reportedly tried to smuggle drugs into the Los Lunas prison. |
It was a call on January 9 that didn’t seem right to one corrections officer at the Central NM Correctional Facility in Los Lunas.
Over the phone the officer hears an inmate tell a man on the other line, “Are you going to play a little baseball this weekend?"
He goes on to say, “Are you going to play a little softball, a little one?"
Then the caller on the other line gets worried about what the prisoner is asking him to do.
“Me stopping right there, don't you think they'll catch that," he says.
After some investigating correction officers cracked the inmate’s code.
The prisoner wanted Eric Gonzales, a parolee, to drop off some drugs in this field next to the prison.
The inmates pick up litter there in the field.
The prisoner was planning to pick it up and smuggle it inside.
Sure enough six days later they found the drugs right where they thought they'd be.
"We knew it was coming in so I had to come over here and look for it,” said Ramon Olguin, a corrections officer with the Security Threat Intelligence Unit. "It took me about ten minutes because it's a lot of walking around in there.”
Olguin said he found a grocery bag and inside he found weed, methamphetamine and Suboxone, a prescription drug to help heroin addicts.
The drug sells for $100 a pop.
Inside the prison, inmates swallow it, smoke it and inject it.
Gonzalez was arrested two days later.
Corrections officers look for anything out of the ordinary when they’re monitoring the inmate’s phone call.
"Colors, objects out of the ordinary," says Cpt. Joe Lytle, a corrections officer at the Penitentiary of New Mexico near Santa Fe.
Some are more difficult than others.
“It can take weeks and months to break the code,” says Lytle.
Lytle says some are less creative than others.
“Can you bring me some lettuce, I'd like to eat some lettuce,” he said. “Can you add some oregano?"
In the past two months, corrections officers have busted seven people trying to smuggle Suboxone into the state's prisons.
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