Allegedly smuggled drug into Chester Co. Prison in his hair
Jarrett Mason
POCOPSON — A Philadelphia man may have had one of the all-time bad hair days after reportedly smuggling packets of heroin into Chester County Prison last month, stashed within his dreadlocks, Chester County District Attorney Tom Hogan said.
Hogan said that Jarrett Mason was arrested on drug charges in Phoenixville on July 15 and remanded to Chester County Prison. Within days, another inmate at the facility reported that Mason was distributing heroin within the prison. A review of video footage at the time of Mason’s arrest revealed that he managed to hide drugs in his hair, authorities said.
“Desperate people do dangerous and dumb things,” Hogan said. “The scourge of heroin hits everywhere, from streets to homes to prisons. This defendant just made a bad situation for himself much, much worse.”
In addition to his previous drug-related charges from his initial arrest, Mason now faces charges of furnishing contraband and drug dealing in a prison, as well as related charges.
And this is a Coatesville story why? Is he a resident presently or formerly? And this gets reported if he’s not from the area but a complete article of Coatesville crime gets compiled by the DLN within the past two days and not the hometown newspaper?
We thought it was of general interest — being that it took place in the county prison. We have four hyperlocal sites and a larger county-wide news site and sometimes share that content among the sites. As a policy, we generally do not run “police blotter” as being an Internet site, that content is available forever on the web (even if we take it down, thanks to Wayback Machine) and we don’t believe in ruining someone’s life because they had one lousy day and go busted for DUI or holding a joint.
Obviously, we do cover crime cases involving more serious issues.
And is our coverage what we want it to be? No. As it is, we lose money every month on this site, subsidized by Unionville and the county-wide site and have to carefully allocate resources. To be honest, it is very hard to get ad dollars out of the Coatesville area. This isn’t a complaint, just a fact and one we’ve built into our business model.
And all of the content is free to our readers always — unlike The Daily Local News, which has a digital limit on stories read online.
If we’re not for you, I invite you to either find your news elsewhere or do what I did: start up your own operation from scratch.