Are

Ohio's

prisons heading

for another

ATTICA?

By Richard C. Widman

A newsman investigating the turmoil in Ohio prisons and the chance of a major revolt hears one word repeated constantly among convicts and reform-minded citizens.

The catchword is "Attica."

A four-day rebellion by inmates of New York's Attica State Correctional Facility ended Sept. 13, 1971, when more than 1,000 state troopers and police stormed the prison to rescue nine guards held as hostages.

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The rebellior and the troopers' assault claimed the lives of 43 prisoners and guards.

Although Attica has become a national symbol of prison protest, Ohio has its own precedent.

Convicts staged two major riots in the Ohio Penitentiary in the summer of 1968.

IN THE JUNE RIOTS that year, convicts caused more than a million dollars worth of damage before they were subdued.

No one was killed in the trouble.

But two months later, the penitentiary convicts rioted again, seizing nine guards as hostages while demanding better treatment and a federal investigation of prison

conditions.

The revolt was ended and the guards rescued when an Army demolition team dynamited holes in the prison walls and

First of a Series

several hundred Columbus police and state highway patrolmen poured through the gaps, killing five convicts.

The consensus of reform groups is that if it could happen in Ohio prisons in 1968, it could happen again.

Gov. John J. Gilligan campaigned on a promise to reform the penal system.

He appointed Bennett J. Cooper, an experienced and dedicated penal expert, commissioner of correction.

Some reforms have been instituted. Progress has been made.

But changes are coming too slowly, according to a flood of correspondence to The Plain Dealer from inmates of state prisons.

They tell of beatings, of prisoners chained to the floors of their cells while lying in their own excrement, of being the victims of homosexual rapes with the tacit approval of guards, of being told to fight off the rapists but of being punished for doing so, of vain efforts to voice their pleas through legitimate channels.

THE PLAIN DEALER has reports: • Of a prisoner beaten so severely by a large group of guards that some of them turned away from the sight to vomit.

• Of prisoners held down and sprayed in the mouth and rectum with Mace.

• Of prisoners showing visitors their wrists bleeding from manacles.

• Of a convict, his arms cuffed behind his back, dragged backwards downstairs to his cell, then kicked in the back.

• Of a convict who refused transfer to the homosexual range, was put naked into the "hole" for three months and was found chattering and blue from the cold when visited by a social worker who reported that the cell had no toilet, that the floor was covered with excrement and that the prisoner had stopped eating so he would not excrete further waste.

-. Of inmates who cut, burned and mutilated their bodies in attempts to get someone from the outside to pay notice to their plight. Some convicts in Ohio prisons have committed the most heinous crimes known to mankind.

They are dangerous men, erupting into violence over the slightest slur, fancied er real.

Some guards, poorly trained and poorly paid for an almost impossible responsibility, believe that the only way they can keep the dangerous convicts under control is to beat them into submission.

IT DOES NOT work.

The beat-them-into-submission disciplinary approach provokes more violence and until the warfare between the guards and prisoners, and between prisoners and prisoners, is ended, rehabilitation programs will be largely wasted.

Although he was one of the leaders of the 1968 riots in Ohio Penitentiary, convict John Conte's level-headedness was credited with saving lives. He talked other convicts out of some of their deadly plans.

Four years later, Conte remains a prisoner and as militant as ever about his views on justice for convicts.

However, according to reports, Conte's spirit is getting meaner. He seems to have given up hope and his attitude alarms his guards.

During a transfer last May from the penitentiary to Chillicothe Correctional Institute. Conte was one of 19 convicts who protested that they were beaten by guards.

THE CONVICTS HAVE lost confidence in the promise that a new state administration would swiftly affect major changes.

The letters, and a series of disturbances in Ohio prisons during the last year, are proof, according to reformers, that an Attica, a new series of revolts like the 1968 turmoil in Ohio Penitentiary, can happen again in this state.

Some reform-minded groups, judges and legislators are speaking out with a loud voice.

Some are not.

They fear that penal administrators will, as they have in the past, charge that the critics are inciting ricts in the prisons by exaggerating conditions.

Gilligan's order that eliminated all mail restrictions in the prisons is responsible for unleashing the flood of complaints from the convicts, and has created an exaggerated picture of the situation in the prisons and the likelihood of revolt. some penal officials contend.

CRITICS SAY the liberalized mailing privileges have made the public conscious of conditions and protest that penal officials formerly were able to conceal.

The correction department recently adopted a new policy regarding visits by newsmen to prisoners.

Wardens. however, retain the sole au-

thority to admit newsmen. They use the power discriminatorily, to keep out reporters who try to investigate reports of brutality and to admit those who write innocuous stories.

The letters containing appeals from convicts continue to come to the desks of newspaper editors and reporters.

If true, the appeals indicate specific violations by guards and prison officials of constitutional guarantees against cruel and unusual punishment, even criminal violations of Ohio laws which spell out how convicts must and must not be treated.

MEANWHILE, convicts' expectations continue to rise as policies are liberalized, causing them to raise their demands.

This is another important factor in measuring the probability of trouble in the prisons.

Wardens and their bosses try to defuse the threats of revolts by granting some concessions, by busing known troublemakers back and forth between prisons to keep them from collecting a foliewing, and sometimes by using force.

The problem in Ohio prisons is more than a century old and so complex that the total story cannot be told.

This, however, is the first of a series of reports.