Philly’s prisons commissioner retires after years of disorder and recent escapes

After years of disorder, a spike in prisoner deaths, and a string of escapes, Blanche Carney, the commissioner of Philadelphia’s Department of Prisons, is leaving the job, she told staffers on Monday.

Carney, who was tapped by former Mayor Jim Kenney in 2016 to oversee the city’s jail complex on State Road in Northeast Philadelphia, tendered her retirement on March 8, and her last day in the role will be April 5, she said in the letter.

A spokesperson for the Department of Prisons confirmed her retirement but declined additional comment. Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said a national search is underway to find a replacement and she anticipates announcing a new leader of the department soon.

Carney’s departure comes amid years of turmoil and scandal, including a troubling number of homicides and deaths inside the facilities and the escape of four people within just six months.

The union representing Philadelphia correctional officers cast a unanimous vote of “no confidence” in Carney last year. The jails were in “chaos,” the union said, amid staffing shortages that put prisoners and staff in danger.

» READ MORE: 29 people died in Philly jails in the pandemic. City officials said they did 'a good job.'

In 2022, a federal judge appointed a monitor to oversee conditions at the jails, as part of the settlement of a class-action lawsuit. That monitoring was supposed to conclude at the end of 2023, but has been extended because the monitor found that the agency was still failing to meet its constitutional obligations. The monitor attributed much of that failure to a workforce now operating with a 40% job vacancy rate.

In a statement Monday, Parker thanked Carney and alluded to the challenges she faced, saying “there will be no shortage of second-guessing her performance.”

”However, I have a great deal of respect for the job the Commissioner has done,” Parker said. “We wish her well, and thank her for her dedication she has demonstrated to our city.”

Carney, 53, has spent 28 years — the majority of her career — working in Philadelphia’s jails, and when she was chosen to lead the department, she became the first woman to do so and, at the time, was one of the only female prisons commissioners in the country.

Carney, who was born and raised in Harrisburg, started as a social worker with Philadelphia’s prisons in 1995, and ascended through the ranks, later becoming deputy commissioner for restorative and transitional services. When the city’s women’s prison was opened in 2004, she helped create women-focused programs that included domestic violence resources and doula classes for pregnant people in custody.

But during the pandemic, as people in the jails were locked in their cells for days on end, the facility that houses around 4,500 became a hot spot of violence. Prisoners were able to hack their cell locks and pop out, causing riots or committing assaults. In 2021, the death toll rose to 18 people in just one year — more than died in New York City’s far larger Rikers Island. And, just in the last six months, there have been three more homicides within the jails.

» READ MORE: Two men escaped a Philly jail, and no one noticed for 18 hours

“Commissioner Carney’s tenure has seen the prison spiral and languish in crisis,” said the Pennsylvania Prison Society’s executive director, Claire Shubik-Richards, “and it highlights the importance that if we’re going to have a safe city we need to have a safe prison.”

She said addressing that crisis is a necessary prerequisite to enacting Parker’s law-and-order vision.

”If Mayor Parker wants more enforcement [and arrests], the first thing she needs to do, before she can do that, is get to a place where we have a safe jail. Right now that jail is no safer than the most dangerous streets of Philadelphia. People are being murdered. Drugs are rampant,” Shubik-Richards said. “If she wants more enforcement, she has to appoint someone who can make that jail safe.”

A report from Pennsylvania Prison Society last year, based on interviews with dozens of incarcerated men, found that violence had surged within the facilities, lockdowns were frequent, and many men had not been outdoors in months.

Carney acknowledged those troubles in her letter to prisons staff, saying the first four years of her time in the role “aligned with collaborative efforts with criminal justice partners to reduce the overreliance on jails for marginalized” people.

But then came the coronavirus pandemic, which she said “caused a tremendous strain on correctional operations worldwide,” including to prisons staff and those in custody.

“It was challenging to say the least, and I remained steadfast through the course,” she wrote.

The department came under increased scrutiny after a string of inmates escaped custody, including one man accused of killing four people.

In the first escape, 18-year-old Ameen Hurst, who has been charged with four murders, and Nasir Grant, 24, broke out of the Philadelphia Industrial Correction Center — an unprecedented episode caused by a series of institutional failures.

Cell doors were easily manipulated open, a guard who fell asleep on her shift, external motion sensors had been turned off, and a known hole in the fence was left unrepaired all contributed to Hurst and Grant’s escape going undetected for 19 hours. Both were caught within about a week.

Then, in September, a 30-year-old woman briefly escaped from PICC by slipping out an unsecured door. Angie Molinuevo then climbed two razor-wire-lined fences before landing on rocks along the Delaware River banks, where prison staff captured her.

Finally, in late November, 34-year-old Gino Hagenkotter escaped while performing supervised work outside on the jail grounds. His body was found about two weeks later in an abandoned warehouse in Kensington. Officials said he died of a drug overdose.

Staff writer Anna Orso contributed to this article.