DOC office worker honored for quick action

<p style="text-align:center;">Amanda Rucker</p>

Amanda Rucker

An administrative office support assistant in the Missouri Department of Corrections was chosen as the State Employee of the Month for February.

Amanda Rucker was recognized for her role in alerting officials to inappropriate digital communications a parolee was attempting to send to an inmate in Jefferson City Correctional Center.

JCCC Deputy Warden Stanley Keely reported Rucker was working for his office when she noticed communications intercepted in the censored folder of the JPay email system contained a large number of photographs featuring young women in suggestive poses, addressed to a JCCC inmate from the same sender. JPay is a private company under contract with the department to provide prisoners with access to email, money transfers and other paid communication services.

Upon checking the source of the photos, Rucker discovered the sender was a known sex offender who was on parole supervision in the St. Louis area. Investigation also revealed the parolee was sending similar pictures to offenders at other institutions through JPay.

Parole supervisors were notified and placed the parolee on GPS monitoring while continuing the investigation, Keely noted. The parolee reportedly failed a polygraph examination and drug test and was found to have violated stipulations of his parole and terms of his community sex offender treatment. His parole was revoked, and he was returned to DOC custody.

“Ms. Rucker’s quick actions and concern for a safer community brought light to the high-risk activities of a dangerous individual who was eventually removed from the community and return to incarceration,” Keely wrote in the form nominating Rucker. “If not for Ms. Rucker’s concern for the subjects in these photos and the possibility that these subjects may have been victims of human (trafficking) themselves, the activities of this offender may have gone overlooked.”