Even if there is no additional carnage, Lucasville is the bloodiest U.S. prison uprising since 33 inmates died in a riot at the New Mexico State Penitentiary in Santa Fe 13 years ago. Inmates insist they will hold fast to their demands, including amnesty for crimes committed during the riot, an end to forced integration of cellmates, increased religious freedom for Muslim prisoners and a halt to compulsory tuberculosis tests, which Muslims object to on spiritual grounds. “We are going to remain no matter what they put on us,” George Skatzes, a white inmate negotiator, said over a local radio station Thursday in the first of two media opportunities arranged by prison authorities. “If we die, we die.”
Exactly what unraveled in Lucasville over Easter weekend remains unclear. Six of the seven dead prisoners are white, but inmate leaders emphatically deny that the violence was racially motivated. The week’s most chilling revelation came at a bizarre televised hostage release Friday afternoon. James Demons, a black prison guard who emerged with his captor to announce his conversion to Islam, said those who died had collaborated with prison authorities. “Those boys was killed because they was snitches. That’s what it boils down to,” he said. In an interview Saturday, a deeply shaken Demons told NEWSWEEK that the uprising was a cooperative venture of black Muslims and the whitesupremacist Aryan Brotherhood gang. He said snitch killing was only a byproduct of the siege, not a motive for it. Other sources say inmates bridled at the hard-line style of warden Arthur Tate Jr. When he took over in 1990, Tate tightened security, forcing prisoners to walk outside yellow lines in the corridors and limiting most of them to one 5-minute phone call a year. “We’re talking about people with very long sentences and not a lot of hope,” said a source familiar with the institution.
On paper, Lucasville is not the likeliest setting for a major prison uprising. Overcrowding is modest compared with many penitentiaries bursting at the seams: its inmate population of 1,819 is I 1 percent beyond designed capacity, the lowest margin in the state. The 4-1 ratio of inmates to guards is lower than the national average. Opened in 1972, four years after the Ohio Penitentiary in Columbus was devastated by a week of rioting that killed five prisoners, Lucasville was hailed as a gleaming example of progressive correction management designed to be the latest word in humane confinement," one Cleveland newspaper feature exulted). Its modern design-with individually managed units branching off main corridors and multiple control rooms that can cordon off trouble spots-was a stark departure from the Bastille-like fortress it replaced.
Yet last week’s unrest exposed long-festering problems. Ex-inmates say Lucasville is a nightmarish institution where guards and inmates divided into racial gangs like the Aryan Brotherhood and the Bloods feed a culture of antagonism and violence. The vulnerable are easy prey for either side. “It was a life-threatening situation every minute,” says Ted Rivers, released three weeks ago. “Weakness can be seen like a beat-up junker on a new car lot.” After an adulteducation teacher was stabbed to death by an inmate in 1990, a state legislative committee report criticized prison administrators for lax security measures. Inmate letters received by committee staff complained of white guards who sympathized with Aryan gang members and looked the other way when they were violent.
Authorities very nearly had a much larger crisis on their hands. Sources tell NEWSWEEK that the Easter Sunday disturbance was less than a minute from reaching Control Center 3 at the crucial intersection of the prison’s three main residential wings. An injured guard stumbled to the control center in time to warn officials to close the crash gates, sealing off the rioters from Cellblocks J and K.
No matter how the siege ends, state officials will certainly face tough questions about their strategy last week. On Wednesday, after prisoners delivered a death threat on a sheet hung from a cellblock window, state prison spokeswoman Tessa Unwin called it “a standard threat they’ve been issuing.” Demons charged Saturday that the comment led directly to the execution of guard Robert Vallandingham. “That man did not die until that woman made a statement like that,” he told NEWSWEEK. Another spokesman, asked about Demons’s charge, said, “We don’t have a response.” The authorities’ decision to allow prisoners access to the media after the murder of a guard is also bound to spark debate. But experts say the lesson of past bloodbaths like Attica-where 11 hostages and 32 inmates were killed in 1971, most by state forces as they retook the New York state prison-is that negotiation must be given a chance to work. “The general advice given by police negotiators is to negotiate on terms set by the hostage-takers,” said Bert Useem, a University of Louisville sociologist.
Perhaps most remarkable about situations like Lucasville is that they don’t happen more often. American prisons, especially those in state systems, are in perilous shape, overcrowded, understaffed and violent. Many of the grossly inhumane conditions that once marked prison life-Alabama inmates sleeping on top of urinal troughs or up to seven prisoners confined to 29-square-foot “doghouses”-have disappeared. And a recent survey by Corrections Compendium, a journal for prison professionals, shows that violence has decreased since 1984, despite rapidly increasing inmate population. But few experts believe prisons are anything other than time bombs with rapidly advancing second hands.
