Former N.J. prison employee sentenced to jail for smuggling scheme

TRENTON – A former New Jersey State Prison employee who accepted bribes to smuggle tobacco into the jail, was barred from any future public employment and must serve prison time, a Superior Court judge decided Monday.

Keith Harris, a former trade technician at the Trenton prison, was found guilty of bribery and money laundering after a weeklong trial in March for crimes he committed while working at the jail nearly three years ago.

During Harris's sentencing Monday, Superior Court Judge Pedro Jimenez gave Harris five years in prison for the bribery count and three years for financial facilitation, according to the Mercer County Prosecutor's Office. He will need to serve five years before he is eligible for parole.

In addition to the prison sentence, Jimenez ordered that Harris be barred from all future public employment and that he give up his pension.

The charges and sentence stem from an incident three years ago, just after a tobacco ban was instituted in New Jersey prisons. Many inmates became desperate and tried to find a way to smuggle tobacco inside, even recruiting Harris and a former corrections officer, Eric Dawson to help.

Investigators from the New Jersey Department of Corrections began looking into the operation in early 2013. They spoke with Dawson, who admitted he had received money from a civilian named Lorenzo Blakeney, an investigator said during Harris's trial.

The connection led them to inmate Roosevelt Withers, who had Blakeney as a regular visitor at the prison.

Withers had a connection to Harris and investigators discovered that Harris, too, had received money from Blakeney.

The total bribe that Harris took was around $2,000 from Blakeney to smuggle tobacco into the prison, prosecutors said during the trial.