It all started innocently enough.
State prison officials sent six female inmates, described as non-violent, to a Howard County horse farm to clear pasture for abused animals. The inmates were all nearing thier release dates and had met all the criteria for the coveted work-release.
In the photo by The Sun's Ken Lam, Ziggy, a former Arabber horse, munches on Hay as Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services Secretary Gary Maynard, left, announces a partnership with Days End Farm Horse Rescue in which female inmates will be working on the farm doing landscaping with the eventual goal of caring for the rescued horses.
Only someone in the prison system forgot to tell the neighbors and the parents of the young volunteers that the inmates were coming, and understandable outrage followed and the program was put on indefinite hold. Then people started to wonder about the inmates themselves -- were they reall "non-violent"?
In today's crime scenes column, I try to answser that question. It's not as easy it may seem. One inmate I focused on, because she was the lead of a feature story on the program, a story that triggered the uproar, was in for second-degree assault on her boyfriend (complete story here).
Here's a bit about what I learned:
I did find one woman who didn't have any trouble with all this:
Cathy Batz, who lives almost adjacent to the Lisbon farm, said her 20-year-old daughter has ridden horses at Days End since she was 8 years old and was at the stables when the inmates were in the fields. "She didn't even see them," the mother said, adding that Jordan's criminal record didn't bother her a bit.
Batz told me that inmates are always out picking up trash along nearby I-70. "If nobody has a problem when prisoners are picking up trash a block away from our homes and a half-mile away from a school," she said, "why do they have a problem when they work on a 58-acre farm?"