Caught smuggling tobacco

 

Instead of being half way through his six-month jail sentence, a Huntington man will spend the next three years behind prison bars for smuggling tobacco into the Lawrence County Jail.

In October, Jeremy Stump, 32, was sentenced to six months in the county jail for one count of fourth-degree receiving stolen property.

According to a report from the sheriff’s office, a rubber glove finger filled with tobacco was found hidden on or in Stump’s body when he was taken to the jail that day to be outfitted into an orange jumpsuit.

Stump was sentenced to third-degree illegal conveyance of a prohibited item into a detention facility Wednesday in Lawrence County Common Pleas Court.

Judge Charles Cooper ordered a three-year prison sentence to be run concurrently with his original six-month jail sentence.

Lawrence County Sheriff Jeff Lawless said it is not uncommon for people to try to smuggle drugs, tobacco or other items into the jail.

“We are not unique from any other jail in the country or the world,” Lawless said.

Tobacco is a common item among contraband that is smuggled into the jail, Lawless said, because of people’s addiction to it.

“(Addiction) causes them to act out in desperate measures,” he said.

Lawless said prisoners have sewn pills into their garments before reporting to jail, or tried to smuggle items in the soles of their shoes, and as in Stump’s case, try to insert items into various orifices.

Several years ago, Lawless said, the department intercepted tobacco that someone was trying to sneak in from the outside via prisoners on work detail.

“A car drives by and tosses out a baggie,” he said. “The baggie had five or six rubber fingers of a glove filled with tobacco.”

Lawless said the rubber fingers were already coated in Vaseline.

Tobacco and drugs aren’t the only items prisoners attempt to sneak past deputies.

Back in the 1980s, a prisoner attempted to smuggle a weapon into the jail.

Lawless said a heavy-set man was trying to clench a small caliber handgun between his buttocks cheeks.

“If they want something bad enough, they’ll make provisions to get it,” Lawless said.