April 6, 2013 Associated Press
COLUMBUS, Ohio — It's been two decades this month since the longest deadly prison riot in U.S. history broke out in southern Ohio and there's trepidation in the air.
A prisons chief in Colorado and a district attorney in Texas and his wife have been slain.
The ratio of inmates to guards inside Ohio's prisons has crept up again after a dip that followed the 11-day siege at Lucasville's Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in 1993.
Double-bunking inmates, a trigger in the uprising that left one corrections officer and nine inmates dead, is back in use at a prison in Toledo. Serious assaults requiring outside medical attention have jumped from an average of three per year to 16 last year, and gang membership, while down slightly, stands at 16 percent.
Paul Goldberg, past executive director of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, which represents unionized corrections officers, said "the red flags are there" that existed in 1993 but were ignored. Read More