Ivy Collins-Harris, a Rochester, New York, attorney, is accused of attempting to bring contraband into the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center in Youngstown. An FBI affidavit says investigators found eight cellphones and chargers concealed in two hollowed-out laptops, along with marijuana and nearly two pounds of tobacco.
Court records cited by Cleveland.com say Collins-Harris told staff she represented federal inmates John Moore and Jordan Dandridge. The FBI affidavit says she was not the attorney of record for either man. She passed the facility's first security checkpoint before staff stopped her for mandatory screening, the outlet reported.
Investigators say the items were found in two places: a security officer discovered two vacuum-sealed packages of tobacco, weighing about two pounds combined, in an accordion-style folder Collins-Harris carried, and a facility investigator found 57 grams of marijuana in the folder. A search of her purse turned up two laptops that investigators say had been hollowed out to hold eight cellphones and multiple chargers, according to the same account.
Search of Vehicle Turns Up Court Credential
Collins-Harris agreed to let investigators search her Jeep Cherokee, where they recovered a New York State Unified Court System attorney secure pass, the station's report notes. Investigators also seized her phone as part of the ongoing investigation. She was charged with attempting to smuggle contraband into a prison and was released from custody on a $20,000 unsecured bond.
What the Reported Court Records Establish
The account of court records cited by Cleveland.com describes an FBI affidavit alleging an attempted contraband smuggling and reports that Collins-Harris was charged and released on a $20,000 unsecured bond. It does not provide a later case outcome, so the reported bond release should not be read as an update on the case's current status.
Collins-Harris was admitted to the Alabama bar in 2020 and the New York bar in 2024, according to the report. The two inmates she claimed to represent are both being held in lockup on charges out of U.S. District Court in the Western District of New York. Dandridge faces drug and gun charges and is awaiting trial, while Moore was previously convicted on gun charges and was ordered held ahead of a hearing on alleged violations of his post-prison supervision.
Attorney Already Faced Charges Days Earlier in New York
The Youngstown incident was not Collins-Harris's first brush with the law this month. Just six days before the alleged prison smuggling attempt, she was arrested by the Seneca County Sheriff's Office and charged in Tyre, New York, with fourth-degree grand larceny and fourth-degree criminal possession of stolen property.
A Private Prison With a Long Contraband History
The Northeast Ohio Correctional Center is a privately operated, medium-security facility owned and managed by CoreCivic that houses roughly 1,000 federal pretrial detainees alongside state inmates, according to Corrections1. The facility operates under federal and state detention contracts, and it has faced repeated contraband problems over the years.
A federal grand jury indicted 14 people over an alleged effort to get drugs into a prison, according to 21 WFMJ.
Insider smuggling has also plagued the facility. A front-desk corrections officer and a registered nurse at the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center were caught in October 2025 and later federally indicted for allegedly smuggling drugs and prohibited items past facility security, according to The Marshall Project, which reported that an internal tip led facility investigators and a federal drug task force to intercept the pair. A wrongful-death plaintiff cited an internal display board known as the Wall of Shame, featuring photographs and details of former employees caught and fired for smuggling contraband, during federal litigation over an inmate drug overdose death, according to The Vindicator.
Earlier Staff-Smuggling Cases
In a separate case, former contract correctional officer Barbara Davis was sentenced on April 29, 2021, after pleading guilty to accepting bribes to bring cellphones and tobacco into NEOCC between November 2017 and November 2018, the Justice Department's Office of the Inspector General reported.
