A former correctional officer at the Federal Correctional Institution in Herlong pleaded guilty this week to smuggling methamphetamine into the Lassen County prison where he worked, admitting he took a $15,000 payoff to sneak nearly two pounds of the drug past security during an overnight shift. Antonio Ray Ramirez, a Susanville resident, entered his plea to one count of distributing methamphetamine, according to court documents.
Ramirez worked as a correctional officer at FCI Herlong starting in August 2024, according to court documents cited by Action News Now. Prosecutors said he bypassed security screening at the start of an overnight shift, then directed an inmate to retrieve the drugs he had concealed in a laundry room. In total, Ramirez smuggled 869 grams of methamphetamine and 127 grams of heroin into the facility, prosecutors said.
The plot did not go as planned. Other correctional officers recovered the drugs from the inmate before they could circulate inside the prison, according to court records. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of California reported that Ramirez pleaded guilty after admitting he smuggled the narcotics into the federal prison in Lassen County.
Federal Charges Carry Steep Mandatory Minimums
Ramirez now faces a maximum sentence of life in prison and a maximum fine of $10 million. Under federal drug trafficking law, distributing 50 grams or more of pure methamphetamine or 500 grams or more of a methamphetamine mixture triggers a mandatory minimum of 10 years in prison, according to the U.S. House Office of the Law Revision Counsel. The court will determine Ramirez's final sentence after weighing federal sentencing guidelines and other statutory factors, with U.S. District Judge Daniel J. Calabretta set to hand down that sentence on January 21, 2027.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Nicholas Fogg and Dhruv M. Sharma are prosecuting the case. The investigation was led by the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General, with assistance from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
A Persistent Problem Inside Federal Prisons
Staff smuggling remains one of the most stubborn sources of contraband inside federal lockups, according to a February 2024 compendium report from the Department of Justice Office of the Inspector General, which pointed to gaps in employee security screening and inmates' coercive manipulation of guards as recurring vulnerabilities. The FBI runs a dedicated Prison Corruption Initiative alongside DOJ OIG specifically to investigate contraband schemes and staff bribery, warning that inmates routinely exploit guards' financial stress or missteps to pressure them into smuggling.
The Ramirez case fits a pattern of recent prosecutions across California's federal prison system. In December 2024, federal prosecutors in the Eastern District of California secured a sentence of more than two years for a California Medical Facility officer who took over $45,000 in bribes to smuggle cellphones to inmates. And just this month, a federal correctional officer at FCC Lompoc in Santa Barbara County and his wife pleaded guilty after accepting $6,650 to smuggle Suboxone and other contraband to an inmate.
Prison Jobs Anchor a Struggling Rural Economy
FCI Herlong, a medium-security facility near the Nevada border, houses roughly 800 to 1,600 male inmates across its main institution and an adjacent minimum-security satellite camp, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Correctional jobs have long anchored the local economy in Lassen County since the decline of the timber industry, with area prisons historically employing roughly half of Susanville's working adults, per the Los Angeles Times.
That reliance on prison employment has only deepened since state officials deactivated the minimum-security California Correctional Center in Susanville in June 2023 as part of a statewide consolidation, leaving FCI Herlong and High Desert State Prison as the county's primary operating correctional facilities, according to the Lassen News. The case remains pending sentencing, and no additional details about Ramirez's motive or how investigators first identified him have been made public.
