Ohio State Penitentiary
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The Ohio State Penitentiary is a 502-inmate capacity supermax prison in Youngstown, Ohio, designed to hold the state's most dangerous prisoners who have poor conduct records. Throughout the last two centuries, there have been two institutions with the name Ohio Penitentiary or Ohio State Penitentiary; the first prison was in Columbus, Ohio.
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[edit] Current edifice
Prisoners are locked in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in concrete cells measuring 7½ x 11 feet. Each cell has a sink and toilet, small desk, concrete stool and concrete slab with a thin mattress. Since Ohio disqualifies supermax prisoners from eligibility for parole (it is one of two such states), prisoners at Youngstown are typically locked under solitary confinement until they "max out" (jailhouse slang for the end of a sentence).
The H Unit, together with the Oak Park Heights maximum security facility in Stillwater, Minnesota, was featured in an one hour TV documentary titled "Maximum Security Prisons", produced by Alan Hall (Beyond Productions) for the "On the Inside" series of the Discovery Channel.
[edit] Legal cases
In 2002, the American Civil Liberties Union won the federal case of Wilkinson v. Austin, requiring certain due process guidelines be used in determining if prisoners can be moved to Ohio State. The number of inmates dropped after a court-ordered review of individual cases determined that two-thirds of the prisoners did not meet the inclusion guidelines set down.
In October 2005, a federal judge ruled that the state can move death row to OSP, while cautioning that he will be monitoring prison officials' efforts to make promised changes to the prison. A majority of Ohio’s death-row prisoners has now been transferred to Youngstown. Before the move, the 194 men on death row were housed at Mansfield Correctional Institution, where death row was moved after the 1993 riots at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. Executions have not been moved and still take place at the Lucasville facility.
[edit] Original prison
The original Ohio Penitentiary was a major prison in Columbus, Ohio. It was finally razed in 1998 to make way for the Arena District in Columbus. During its reign as Ohio's top prison, the penitentiary hosted many notable prisoners including the murderer James H. Snook (inventor of the "snook hook" of veterinary fame and an Olympic gold medalist in Antwerp) before his execution, and the novelist O. Henry (for embezzlement). During the American Civil War, the prison housed members of John Hunt Morgan's Confederate cavalry, who had been detained following Morgan's Raid. Morgan and several of his men successfully escaped captivity and returned to the South.
[edit] External links
- [1] Bill Nichols, "Contemplating Torture," Prisonersolidarity.org, Jan. 27, 2006.
- [2] Andrew Welsh-Huggins, "Federal judge allows state to move death row to Youngstown," The Associated Press, Oct. 4, 2005
- [3] Staughton and Alice Lynd, "Prison Advocacy in a Time of Capital Disaccumulation," The Monthly Review, August 2001.
- [4] Daniel Sturm, "Ohio's Abu Ghraib," ZNet, August 3, 2005.
