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A former Bureau of Prisons correctional officer will do 43 months behind bars after admitting to
smuggling oxycodone, marijuana, cellphones, cigarettes, alcohol and other substances into the Metropolitan Correctional Center in exchange for over $75,000 in bribes from inmates, the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York said Tuesday.
The former officer, Perry Joyner, pleaded guilty in December to one count of conspiracy to commit honest services wire fraud. The 30-year-old former CO, of Orange, N.J., was among current and former federal BOP employees and former inmates indicted in November 2021 for their alleged participation in a contraband smuggling scheme that lasted from about October 2019 until January 2021 at the Park Row federal facility.
He was sentenced Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Andrew L. Carter Jr.
Joyner, who was also sentenced to two years of supervised release and ordered to forfeit $77,894, was originally charged with obstructing justice for intimidating and threatening an inmate whom he thought had informed officials about the smuggling operation.
“Correctional officers are entrusted to care for and maintain custody and control over inmates. Perry Joyner violated that trust repeatedly by soliciting and receiving bribes from inmates and by attempting to coordinate the assault of an inmate whom he believed was cooperating with the Government,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a release announcing the sentencing. “This sentence should send a message to correctional officers: you will be held accountable when you violate your sworn duty to ensure the care, custody, and control of our nation’s inmate population.”
Last month, one of Joyner’s co-conspirators, Sharon Griffith-McKnight, who worked as a unit secretary at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, pleaded guilty to one count of participating in a conspiracy to provide and possess prison contraband. She also admitted to having had a nearly yearlong sexual relationship with an inmate under her custodial care.
Griffith-McKnight was also accused of trying to influence a federal judge by vouching that a high-ranking member of the Nine Trey Gangster Bloods gang, Anthony “Harv” Ellison, “had proven himself to be a model inmate.”
Ellison was on trial in connection with his participation in the Nine Trey Gangster Bloods’ kidnapping in July 2018 of Daniel Hernandez, the rapper better known as 6ix9ine or Tekashi69, and the slashing of another victim that October. Ellison was sentenced to 24 years in prison.
It is unclear when Griffith-McKnight will be sentenced.
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