Ohio’s Prisons Grow Less Violent Despite More Assaults on Guards

Officials with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (ODRC) say changes in the state’s prison management system are responsible for an overall decline in assaults against prison guards between 2007 and 2012, but prison guards’ union officials blame that same system for an increase in the number of serious attacks on guards.

An ODRC study revealed that serious attacks on prison guards – those requiring guards to be taken to the hospital – more than doubled during the six years covered by the study, from 19 serious assaults in 2007 to 44 such attacks in 2012.

According to ODRC figures, the number of non-serious assaults and harassment against guards – ranging from sexual assaults to assaults in which guards were not injured – remained steady from 2007 to 2012. Moreover, the numbers showed that overall assaults on prison staff actually declined in the three most recent years of the study, dropping from a high of 23 guards per 1,000 prisoners in 2008 to less than 22 guards in 2012. During the same period, the average daily number of prisoners hovered between roughly 49,000 and 51,000.

ODRC spokeswoman Ricky Seyfang said overall violence in Ohio prisons continued to decline by 5% in 2012, although specific data was not yet available.

ODRC officials credited the reduction in overall prison violence to the new prison structure, implemented in 2011, that isolates first-time, non-violent offenders and prisoners ready to be released from violent prisoners and habitual offenders. The state’s most dangerous prisoners are now housed at the so-called “big four” institutions earmarked for maximum security.

The Ohio Civil Service Employee Association, the union representing prison guards, argues that the new prison structure – concentrating the most vicious criminals in only a small number of facilities – is responsible for the jump in the number of violent assaults on its members.

“When you compile all these guys into a handful of institutions, your violence is going to increase,” said Phil Morris, union chapter president and a guard at the maximum security Lebanon Correctional Institution. Morris includes Lebanon among the “big four,” along with prisons in Mansfield, Toledo, and Lucasville, Ohio.

In fact, staffers at Lebanon and nearby Warren Correctional Institution make up about 20% of the 124 serious injury attacks reported in Ohio prisons between 2010 and 2012, according to an analysis conducted by The Journal-News newspaper. DRC figures revealed that during the same period, the Southern Ohio Correctional Institution in Lucasville, which houses more maximum security prisoners than any other Ohio facility, led the state with a total of 200 reported assaults; 37 of them, physical attacks.

In May 2013, Ohio’s Correctional Institution Inspection Committee issued a report which described the “violent prison” at Lebanon as over capacity by about 600 prisoners and “in need of improvement” for safety and security. Then in August 2013, the panel reported “significant challenges” and “record turnover in staff” at the Toledo Correctional Institution. Since Toledo began accepting maximum security prisoners in February 2013, the committee noted, the facility has seen a 73% increase in prisoner-on-staff assaults.

Morris said understaffing and overcrowding only exacerbate the concentration of the state’s most violent offenders in just a few prisons, making them significantly more dangerous places to work.

“Unfortunately, it’s our people that get caught in the cross hairs,” Morris said. “You’ve got to reduce the prison population and you’ve got to spread out the more violent felons.”

A report presented by DRC Director Gary Mohr to the Ohio State Assembly in 2012 voiced concern for the rising number of violent assaults in the state’s prisons. “The patterns over the past six years are disturbing,” the report noted. “Assaults on staff resulting in serious injury to one or more staff members is a significant problem at the present time with regard to our efforts in reducing institutional violence.”

The DRC report noted, however, that the overall decline in all assaults on guards was accompanied by a corresponding decrease in the number of serious IOI (inmate-on-inmate) assaults. The rate of serious injury IOI assaults was projected to decline by 26% in 2012, after more than doubling between 2007 and 2011. And the total number of IOI sexual assaults and attempted sexual assaults has decreased by more than a third between 2007 and 2012.

Still, DRC figures showed, those numbers don’t equate to a less violent prison culture. Fights between prisoners, which accounted for 72% of all rules infractions statewide, increased by a reported 157 per 1,000 prisoners in 2007 to 230 per 1,000 prisoners in 2011.

Other types of “assaults” on guards, as defined by DRC, included so-called harassment assaults – “spitting, the throwing or squirting of bodily fluids, known or unknown liquids, food or other non-injury causing objects,” and inappropriate physical contact, such as prisoners purposely bumping into guards, elbowing or “pushing their way past staff, or grasping or slapping away the hand or arm of staff who are attempting to search, restrain or get (the prisoner’s) ID badge.”

While harassment assaults – which represented nearly half of all DRC-reported assaults – have hovered around 10 per 1,000 prisoners each year since 2007, inappropriate physical contact incidents rose by about 35% and were expected to reach a near-peak of 123 statewide in 2012.

In addition, non-violent IOI assaults (assaults not including fights) have “steadily risen,” the DRC reports, from 1,023 statewide in 2007 to 1,485 in 2011.

“This reflects how extensive the inmate-on-inmate assault problem has become in the DRC system,” the report said.

DRC also reported an extraordinary increase in “inmate disturbances,” which the American Correctional Association defines as “any event caused by four or more inmates that disrupts the routine and orderly operation of the prison.” Such disturbances increased more than threefold throughout Ohio’s prison system from 2007 to 2012.

“With regard to how often these incidents occur,” the report noted, “there has never been a month during the past six years where there was not at least one inmate disturbance.” As recently as July 2012, there were 20 inmate disturbances, matching an all-time, single-month high that was reached in December 2011.

The guards union has been critical of Republican Gov. John Kasich and DRC Director Mohr for under-reporting past violence against prison guards, calling the latest report “disturbing.”

“Our members knew from first-hand experience that the reality on the ground was different from what (DRC) was reporting,” union official Jimmy Adkins told the Columbus Dispatch. “We think this report is a wake-up call to the Kasich administration that they need to take a serious look at some of the recommendations this union has made, including an increase in officers and other correction employees.”

The DRC report, however, makes no such recommendation. Rather, DRC officials want better implementation of general population and security-threat group classification policies, “more effective control of the most violent and disruptive inmates,” and incentives to encourage prisoners to achieve lesser-security status.

Additionally, the report called for better communication between guards and prisoners, less “clustering” of younger prisoners, and “additional legal mechanisms to increase time in prison for inmates who commit serious assaultive behavior.”

Sources: "A Report on Assaults, Disturbances, Violence, and Prosecution in the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation & Correction: Jan. 1, 2007 through Sept. 30, 2012," ODRC; www.dispatch.com; www.daytondailynews.com

Subscribe today

Already a subscriber? Login