Presented by whom and in what context ? I will not claim that newspaper and magazine articles typically talk about female inmates grooming the male employees - but it really does depend on who is presenting the story. Of course, if an article is based on an interview with a female staff member , she’s going to claim to have been manipulated and groomed and if it’s based on an interview with the inmate, he or she is going to claim to have been coerced. On the other hand , if the article is based on official sources - they very rarely mention anything about either manipulation or coercion, because it really isn’t relevant. The reason any of it ever comes up at all is because the staff member did something inappropriate. Maybe they smuggled items to the inmate, maybe the gave the inmate special privileges of some sort, maybe they assisted in an escape attempt, maybe they had sexual contact with the inmate. The only one of those things that is likely to be the result of either coercion or grooming is the sexual activity - and no one officially cares why the staff member engaged in sexual activity with the inmate. If it was voluntary on the staff member’s part , it doesn’t matter whether there was manipulation by the inmate or coercion by the staff member.
Oh and about Susan Smith - even though at least one of the prison employees said she manipulated him , he was sentenced to five years probation for his conviction of having intercourse with an inmate. ( I think the other got three months in jail)
Before we get any further, I just to remind folks that my original remark was not, “Oh, Vicky White did nothing wrong. Casey is solely responsible for the whole thing.” Why did Vicky W. run off with this violent, incarcerated criminal? Some posters in this thread proposed a very rational Eleanor Rigby scenario. It occurred to me that VW needn’t have been terribly lonely to have been manipulated. That doesn’t mean she wasn’t criminally responsible for her actions. Motive ≠ excuse.
As for the whole, “nobody would say that if she were a male guard and Casey White a female prisoner” complaint, I have no idea why someone would want to inject gender into the possible scenario I posed. The fact is, as one criminal justice expert put it [bolding mine],
For those of us who work in criminal justice, namely corrections, most criminal offenders are master manipulators.
Note: NOT male offenders or female offenders.
And a few year ago, Laura Bedard, a prison administrator, cautioned
Sometimes, by virtue of a staff member’s job, they can over-identify with the inmate population. They begin to see the inmates as peers, not people under their care, custody and control. Inmates watch every move we make; they see our strengths, but they also see our weaknesses. They prey on those weak points. They learn our personalities and they squeeze us when they can.
It has to do with human nature in prison conditions. It has nothing to do with gender. I hope we can move on now.
Just based on the media accounts that I saw and read, there was an awful lot of suggestion that he was likely responsible for the idea to escape together, and that she somehow was manipulated by him. There was no evidence presented to support this theory, but it certainly seemed plausible since she was a model cop for decades and he was a murderer. Sure, maybe he was a “master manipulator”, but there was no evidence of this. If the jail is full of manipulators, then isn’t it more likely she would have done something like this much earlier in her career? She fended them all off for that long, and just before her retirement, she finally succumbed?
And I’m not disagreeing that this is a realistic theory, but it is just as plausible that she hatched the idea. I mean, the guy knew he was going to prison for life, so it seems like it would be much easier for her to convince him, rather than the other way around. Since this theory wasn’t presented by the media reports I read, I assumed that there was some gender bias (even with the knowledge that he was a murderer - so we would naturally assume he’s the culprit, and she was a model cop winning Employee of the Month awards). I’m not saying anyone here was doing that, just questioning why the former was presented as more viable than the latter. But as I think about it more, I do think that his notorious history is the reason that most naturally want to blame him. But I am just not convinced that his criminal acts in any way correlate to an ability to manipulate a seasoned cop. Not every murderer is Ted Bundy.
As an adult, I’ve always been a pretty rational person and usually made fairly thoughtful decisions. Then I went into full blown menopause and my hormones and moods were swinging like they did when I was a teenager.
Late 50’s is fairly old for that, but you never know.
A female nurse I worked with who’d worked years in Corrections pursued an inmate who was my patient. She called him down to the health unit for bogus reasons when others were not present, gave him notes about how special he was and how she felt about him, etc. So much so that the inmate reported it to authorities, as he wasn’t happy with the attention. That’s how she got busted.
Although I have often said going through menopause was like a second puberty. But not everyone has the same level of emotional decision making/poor judgement during either puberty.
Of course it’s possible. It’s just extremely unlikely. You think he was just playing her a little so he could get extra food and other perks? This is a guy who’s tried to escape before and has a history of playing prison officials:
This wasn’t White’s first attempt to escape, nor was it the first time he had gained the trust of correctional officials.
In 2020, while White was being held in Lauderdale County’s detention center, authorities learned he planned to escape the jail and take a hostage, Singleton said.
“We shook him down, and we did find a shank in his possession – a shank is a prison knife – and we retrieved that. We immediately had him shipped back to the Department of Corrections,” Singleton said.
…Likewise, Casey White had previously gained the trust of officials of the Limestone County Sheriff’s office.
“When he was in Limestone County after a little while he had earned the trust of the Sheriff’s department at that time, and they allowed him to be a trustee inside the jail,” Bryant told WAFF.
Prisoners have a compelling interest in not being prisoners, and White’s past tells us a lot about him. Regardless of which of the Whites first verbalized the idea of an escape, you can bet it was Casey White’s end game all along.
I listened to a true crime podcast (forgot the criminal names unfortunately) where a woman who was either a prison psychologist or prison counselor fell in love with a male prisoner despite the fact he was in prison for the rape and attempted murder of two women. Despite having a master’s degree and being relatively youthful (early 30s so it’s not like she was too old to go to clubs to socialize) she basically backed him up on all reviews and parole boards and actually got him released early on parole for good behavior.
So then she immediately has him move into her house and guess what happens? Dude robs and murders her. What else did she think would happen for a dude who already did it twice in the past?
It’s important to remember that some of these con artists are good at manipulating people. And what else do they have to do with their time other than try to manipulate other people for gain?
I recall a notorious case of a male felon who managed to seduce/suborn 7 or 8 female staff in 5 different correctional institutions, DESPITE having massive general announcements/bulletins to all staff at this final 2 prisons advertising the fact that he was a serial seducer and his past victims had lost their jobs and some did jail/prison time for their actions with him.
Some guys are real charmers (I suspect psychopathy whenever I find myself thinking one of my patients is a ‘great person’), and some women are extra susceptible to such men.
A close relationship between a sociopath and a prison employee doesn’t have to involve romance or sex.
We’re coming up on the 41st anniversary of the murder of Donna Payant, a corrections officer at Green Haven in New York State. Her killer was already serving life sentences for two kidnappings and murders of women, after previous kidnaps/assaults of other women for which he had served prison sentences on two prior occasions. In spite of this history, Payant reportedly formed a “friendship” with this inmate, Lemuel Smith, and supposedly arranged for him to make a jewelry box for her. She wound up sexually assaulted inside the prison by Smith, murdered and tossed into prison trash, and her body was eventually found in a nearby landfill.
“At his sentencing hearing on June 10, 1983, Lemuel Smith put his feelings on record.”
“I got so much time they can’t do nothing to me,” he said. “Think about it. If I wanted some sex, I could rape, I could sodomize. They can’t do nothing to me!”"
Quite a few people decided he’s innocent though, including attorney William Kuntsler.