"These days, the tattooed prison guard who was fired for posing naked on the Internet is decorating the walls of her Hagerstown home with a checkerboard of silver flashing, a design trick she learned from 'Trading Spaces,' Marcie Betts confessed, then lights another Cherokee cigarette.

She is buying calendars on sale and cutting up the pictures to hang as cheap but chic art for her walls. She hangs out at Voodoo Tattoo in Hagerstown and has inked her entire left arm with 'sad' tattoos, such as a woman in a red dress, with a bleeding leg stump, bandages, a casket behind her and the caption 'Loved You to Pieces'; and the hand in the blue, open sea and a cross that says, 'Not Waving But Drowning.' Her right arm, she says, 'is going to be my happy arm, but I don't have anything there yet.'

Betts was fired from her job as a Maryland correctional officer in January, after she had sailed through the six-week training academy and the one-week gun training course. After only a week on the job, she was called into the warden's office at a state prison in Washington County and asked about 81 explicit photos her husband had taken of her, which had been bought for $300 by a Web site called BurningAngel.com -- a site that 'I just thought . . . was really cool,' she said. 'It was real girls, not blond bombshells.'

One of those pictures, showing the large tattoo of birds, cherries, a dagger and a skull across her chest, was later published, without her knowledge, in Tabu Tattoo magazine. A copy of the magazine was intercepted en route to an inmate.

Concerned that the photos would make their way into the institution and would result not only in the inmates' trying to assault Betts but also in possibly endangering fellow correctional officers when they came to her defense, the warden put her on leave -- and subsequently fired her.

Almost immediately, Betts sued on the grounds that the prison was violating her First Amendment rights, and a judge ruled in her favor last month.

'Why an inmate would be more prone to attack because he has the Employee's photographs rather than any other photographs has not been demonstrated,' wrote Administrative Law Judge D. Harrison Pratt in his opinion.

Last week, though, he issued a 'stay of enforcement,' halting the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services from rehiring Betts to 'her previous position with restitution of full pay and benefits,' until the matter has been appealed to a Circuit Court judge in Washington County.

The correctional system stands by its decision. 'Our people clearly felt that having explicit photos on an adult Internet Web site is totally inconsistent with somebody being a correctional officer,' said Mark Vernarelli, the system's public information officer. 'We're not out to infringe upon anybody's rights, but we are absolutely out to protect the employees and the inmates.'

Or, as one source close to the case put it: 'Maryland's prisons aren't filled with Harvard Law School intellectuals. They're filled with people who tend to objectify people to begin with. And when someone like Marcie Betts presents herself as a sexual object . . . '

Betts's attorney, Lawrence G. Walters of Orlando, Fla., points out that every officer who spoke against his client was a man. 'It's the cultural war,' he said. 'You had all these male corrections officers [saying], 'She can't be seen as anything other than a sex object once she's been seen as nude.' None of the inmates even saw these pictures.'

In addition to the magazine mailed to an inmate, an anonymous packet of photographs was slipped under the warden's door, and the warden asked a captain and lieutenant to look into the matter. As part of the investigation, they paid a membership fee to the adult site and printed out each of the 81 pictures of Betts.

'How did these pictures come to light?' asks Walters, who specializes in First Amendment cases. 'We like to fantasize about some [correctional employee] looking at the computer and having a good time.'

The Cherokees that Betts chain-smokes these days cost about $10 a carton, she said, or $9 a carton less than her preferred Camels, which she could best afford during the couple of weeks she spent at the highest-paying job of her life: guarding the murderers, drug dealers and robbers incarcerated at Roxbury Correctional Institution.

'Around here, you have to work at the [Mack Trucks] plant itself or at the prison to find a good paying job, unless you're a doctor or a lawyer,' the 22-year-old adds, sitting at her dining room table, sucking on another Cherokee as her Christmas tree flashes fiber-optic whites, blues and reds in the corner.

Until she started the prison training academy on Nov. 18, 2002, Betts had spent the five years since graduating from high school in Frederick County supporting herself, and later her husband, with jobs as diverse as: a piercer in a tattoo parlor, a caregiver to mice raised for research, a security guard at the Mack Trucks manufacturing site and a receptionist-turned-insecticide sprayer for a pest control company.

But beyond ensuring a decent paycheck, Betts says, the prison training also encouraged her to think about long-range planning, advice that echoed her father's urgings. He worked for the National Institutes of Health, she says, 'and always said, 'Think five years down the road.' '

'I had plans' for a career in corrections, she said. 'I wanted to work for rank. I wanted to be one of the officers who work with dogs and do drug tests.' She and her husband share their home with three dogs: Sidney, a blind boxer they saved from a breeder; Mugsy, a mutt they got at the pound; and Spike, a 4-year-old frolicsome Boston terrier.

So being a K-9 prison guard, she says, 'would've been something really cool for me to work toward.' Instead she's been out of work since January, waiting for the case to be resolved.

In the August issue of Penthouse, Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor, published an essay defending Betts: 'If a state prison were permitted to fire a guard based on what the prisoners might imagine, could they also fire a guard who was too busty or too sexy?'

The pictures were taken and sold before Betts was hired by the prison system, and though they are, indeed, Marcie Betts, she wonders: 'What if I had a twin sister and she did all of those? Or she was in the movies and did sex scenes? Would I be punished for what she did?'" (Darragh Johnson, Washington Post, December 24, 2003)