This was more than just nickel-and-diming the Oregon prison system. This was flat-out quartering them!

Over the course of nine years, somebody has stolen about $26,000 from the Oregon prison system — a quarter at a time. That’s about 104,000 quarters. As reported in articles.washingtonpost.com.

So, just where do all these quarters come from? Visitors to the medium-security Oregon State Correctional Institution in Salem plunk the quarters into lockers before going through security.

No one can figure out what happened to the coins, and state corrections officials couldn’t explain why the thievery went undetected for so long,

Auditors discovered the theft this spring as they were looking into the multimillion dollar Inmate Welfare Fund made up of vending machine receipts, inmate fines and concession contracts. It’s used for such things as bus tickets for departing inmates and prison cable television.

Investigators initially suspected the theft was linked to another embezzlement case involving the fund that a grand jury is examining. The amount of money involved in the locker thefts was relatively small in comparison to the fund that processed about $30 million in those years.

Surprisingly, stealing from the prison was pretty easy. Not only that, officials claim they have no suspects. I hope the thieves are mandated to take a 24 hour anti-theft class.