CINCINNATI — A River City Correctional Center inmate is being sought by police after she allegedly walked away from a job interview in Westwood, according to River City Executive Director Scott McVey.
In an email sent Thursday afternoon, McVey said 38-year-old Amanda Jones "went AWOL" from her job interview at CM Personnel Services on Glenway Avenue in Westwood.
McVey said Jones was in River City Correctional for a probation violation tied to a previous burglary charge.
Jones is roughly 5-feet-7-inches tall and weighs around 161 pounds, McVey said. McVey did not provide any additional information or descriptions of Jones in his email; an attached photo in black-and-white depicts Jones, but it's difficult to make out identifiers like eye color and exact hair color from the image.
River City Correctional Center was the focus of a WCPO I-Team investigation in 2022, after multiple inmates escaped from the facility, including a man who then held a woman hostage at knifepoint in a hotel room for around 12 hours before an officer shot and killed him.
Since then, the I-Team examined more than 1,000 pages of documents and hours of video from courts, law enforcement agencies, River City and the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.
River City incident reports documented inmate violations inside the facility, including staff concerns about the “security threat” posed by alleged members of a prison gang in 2022.
The I-Team also obtained a list of River City employees and searched for their names in local court databases. Court records confirmed that River City had hired two people with active felony cases to supervise inmates and provide protection for the minimum-security facility, also in 2022. The I-Team confirmed that one of them had active warrants for her arrest for three months of her employment with River City.
River City ended their employment after confirming they had active felony cases, according to McVey.
In January, McVey announced the minimum-security facility would focus more on security and higher-risk offenders, telling the River City Facilities Governing Board the facility was piloting new technology to better monitor inmates, including through the use of more video and audio sensoring.
McVey said River City also ordered additional surveillance cameras.
Despite this, in March state Rep. Cecil Thomas said he plans to call for a state legislative hearing to question River City officials under oath about how the state-funded facility is being operated.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” Rep. Cecil Thomas said at the time. “There’s some problems that need some serious attention.”
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