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| Ohio Union Says Prosecutors Soft on Prison Crime |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 10/07/2002 |
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The state is too soft on violent inmates, prison officers say, an accusation that the prison system and prosecutors deny. 'There's too many cases of [officers] saying they've been assaulted and no one's done anything about it,' said Peter Wray, spokesman for the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, which represents the state's approximately 7,400 prison officers. Last year, the state reported 528 inmate assaults on prison employees, mostly officers, and 445 inmate assaults on other prisoners. The prison system reported just 326 of all of those assaults to the State Highway Patrol, which investigates crimes on state property. Many assaults in prison involve inmates throwing bodily fluids, said Andrea Dean, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. Though recorded as assaults for internal purposes, they aren't forwarded to state police. 'The ones that we refer to the patrol are those where someone has been injured,' Dean said. State police take such crimes seriously, said patrol Lt. Gary Lewis. 'It's still an offense, we have to make sure those offenses are investigated completely, regardless of who's involved,' he said. Officers have held several protests because of what they call unsafe working conditions, including a demonstration October 3 outside the Warren Correctional Institution in Lebanon. Wray said he believes the state has an 'institutional incentive' to keep numbers down to avoid criticism over recent layoffs. He said the state sends an unofficial message to officers not to report something every time they have a run-in with a prisoner. The union does not have its own assault statistics. 'If they can show me a report in which we tell correction officers that are part of the union not to report assaults, that will be magical,' prisons director Reginald Wilkinson said recently. Citing a tight budget, the department has eliminated more than 1,800 positions since January 2001, including more than 260 layoffs. In April, the department closed the Orient Correctional Institution south of Columbus. The department hopes to hire about 100 officers in the next few months, Wilkinson said. |
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