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| Ore. inmates under lockdown after dozens fight |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 09/30/2003 |
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More than 1,200 inmates remained locked in their cells as investigators tried to find out why dozens of prisoners with makeshift weapons fought in the recreation yard at the Federal Correctional Institution in Sheridan, Oregon. The Thursday night melee was the worst flare-up of violence at the prison since an uprising in 1993. One inmate, Ronald Acosta, 47, who is serving time for a bank robbery, was stabbed but is expected to live, prison officials said. Officials said officers were able to quell the outbreak promptly with oral commands and weren't forced to fire warning shots into the ground. None of the officers was injured. 'We have no information to release yet about why it started,' said Traci Billingsley, a Federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman in Washington, D.C. The lockdown will allow investigators to question inmates individually about what started the violence, Billingsley said Friday. It was unclear whether any of the prison's most notorious inmates were involved in the confrontations. Ahmed Bilal, one of two brothers who pleaded guilty this month to trying to aid the Taliban in the war in Afghanistan, is among the medium-security prison's newest residents. Crowding was an issue in the 1993 uprising, when 300 prisoners burned down a building and broke more than 200 windows. Ten years later, the issue is resurfacing. This month, an inmate filed a petition in U.S. District Court in Portland, asking a judge to stop plans to add a third bunk to hundreds of 8-by-12-foot, two-man cells. The prison wants nearly every cell to have a third bunk by next year. The triple-bunking, officials said, would be a temporary fix as they house more inmates in Sheridan and await the completion of two new federal prisons in California. 'It's going to be done in a safe and humane manner,' said Dan Dunne, a federal prisons spokesman. 'In many cases, inmates would rather be triple-bunked than be hundreds and hundreds of miles from their family.' Most federal prisons are operating at nearly 40 percent more than their capacity, Dunne said. Randsom Ali, the Sheridan prison's executive assistant, said it was too early to tell whether crowding caused the melee. |
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