A cellphone had just been seized from an inmate named Akeem Joseph and placed on the desk of a Louisiana State Police investigator at Elayn Hunt Correctional Center. Then it rang.
The number traced back to Trenda Parker, a correctional officer at the same prison. She was arrested a day later, on March 25, and admitted to communicating with Joseph for weeks.
A month before, a phone pulled from inmate Dishawn Branch revealed he’d been chatting over social media with an Elayn Hunt nurse Canecia Burrell, and Sgt. Christiana Hardin, both of whom were subsequently arrested. In early March, a corrections officer named Francis Smith was arrested after investigators found she had been having sex with an inmate and had children with him…