A federal correctional officer in Sumter County received a sentence of three years and one month in federal prison for accepting bribes as a public official and giving contraband to a federal prisoner, according to court records.
Samuel Smith, a correctional guard at the Coleman Federal Correctional Complex in Sumter County, pleaded guilty in February 2025 after officials discovered him smuggling 668 grams of marijuana into the prison.
According to a Department of Justice investigation, Smith smuggled drugs into the jail to sell to detainees for more than eight months, sneaking them in through his duty vest between December 18, 2023, and September 4, 2024.
Along with the prison sentence, the court ordered Smith to lose $43,901, which is the amount of money he received in bribes.