By Alan Johnson
The Columbus Dispatch
COLUMBUS, Ohio — Last year, 46 Ohio prison corrections officers left for work but didn’t come home to their families that night.
Most were so seriously injured on the job in state prisons that they required hospital treatment and had to be off work for days, weeks or, in some cases, months.
The Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, the union representing prison employees, urged state officials yesterday to add 400 corrections officers to the budget, nearly five times the 83 that Gov. John Kasich proposed hiring in his mid-biennium budget plan.
“Corrections officers are getting hurt because of the understaffing, and some are getting hurt badly,” Christopher Mabe, union president, said at a Statehouse news conference. “They are suffering career-ending injuries and a lifetime of emotional scars.”
While the number of physical assaults on officers declined in recent years, serious, often savage assaults jumped to a seven-year high, state figures show. Meanwhile, the number of front-line corrections officers declined by 846 from 2007 to 2013, and the prisoner population rolled up to more than 50,000.
The inmate-to-guard ratio, now about 7.4 to 1, has been rising because of the increase in the prison population, coupled with decreases in the number of front-line officers.
There is no established national standard for the ratio, but federal prisons maintain a rate of about 5 to 1, according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Jeff Cavendish and Monica Meade know firsthand about the occupational hazards of being prison guards.
Cavendish, 29, who works at the Noble Correctional Institution in Caldwell, was trying to move a prisoner who lingered in a dining hall after the meal when the inmate turned on him, punching him in the forehead with a closed fist and knocking him to the floor. The inmate continued to punch Cavendish while he was down until other employees pulled him away. Cavendish suffered a concussion and other injuries and was off work for 45 days.
Cavendish said state officials must “stop robbing Peter to pay Paul and increase safety within our walls” by hiring more corrections officers.
Meade, 37, was assaulted by a male inmate at Trumbull Correctional Institution in Leavittsburg, near Warren. The inmate punched Meade in the face and tried to push her over the guardrail of a third-floor prison housing unit. The mother of three was off work for six months, mostly due to the psychological trauma from the incident.
“Please take into consideration what we have to face every day to secure our own institutions,” Meade said.
Ricky Seyfang, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said, “The safety and security of our staff is a No. 1 mission. Our agency has zero tolerance for violence against our staff.”
She said thousands of inmates have been moved to more-secure facilities under Director Gary Mohr’s three-tier reorganization plan.
While the agency hopes to hire 293 new employees, less than a third would be corrections officers. The others would fill a variety of positions, including nurses, case managers, counselors, social workers, classification specialists, psychologists, parole officers and administrators.
“We believe the offenders need additional access to programming and mental-health and medical services. . . .We think it takes cooperative effort of all corrections professionals to reduce violence,” Seyfang said.