By Amanda Seitz
Dayton Daily News
DAYTON, Ohio — The roughly 2,500 inmates and 500 staffers at the Lebanon Correctional Institution are living and working in a safer environment since Warden Ernie Moore took the helm, state officials say.
Under Moore, who was honored as the state’s Warden of the Year, violence at the prison has dropped dramatically, fewer inmates are punished in the prison’s segregation unit and less workers than ever are leaving their job at the prison — saving taxpayers thousands of dollars.
The result, state officials hope, is more inmates leaving Lebanon prison in better shape to re-enter Ohio’s neighborhoods.
“We’ve got to make sure we’re in the business of giving people the opportunity to improve,” Moore said. “If you’re a family and your neighbor goes to prison for three years, guess where that neighbor is coming back three years later?”
Diffusing tension
When Moore began as warden at Lebanon in July 2012, one of the state’s largest prisons, staff turnover in the prison hoovered around 10 percent. Nearly 400 men were sitting in the prison’s segregation unit, an area used to separate inmates who act out from the general population. Corrections officers used force on inmates more often than any other Ohio prison that year.
“I didn’t sense much hope in the inmate population,” Moore said in an exclusive interview with this newspaper. “I could sense when I came into the prison that first Sunday that there was some tension. One of the ways you sense that is eye contact. Are inmates making eye contact with you? Is there dialogue taking place between inmates and staff?”
When Moore took over, the prison was not only on the state’s radar for its violent record and a 2010 protest involving 1,000 inmates, but also because the previous warden was demoted in 2012 amid a prison sex scandal involving staff.
Ohio prisons director Gary C. Mohr asked Moore — also a former colleague — to lead.
“I didn’t think twice about it because of the strength of his leadership,” Mohr said of the warden.
Moore soon began re-thinking how often prison staffers were putting someone in the segregation unit, also called restrictive housing. To whittle that population down, correction officers often work on verbal counseling with an inmate before putting them in segregation. Also, the prison changed its approach to isolating inmates after fights. Instead of sending any inmate involved in a fight to restrictive housing, correction officers now typically just send the aggressor, for example.
Since he landed the job, two of the prison’s five segregation units have been shuttered. The segregated unit has dropped from a population of 391 in 2012 to roughly 175 today.
Studies show that inmates who are placed in segregation units sometimes face mental health troubles following the experience, said Joanna Saul, the executive director for Ohio’s bi-partisan Correctional Institution Inspection Committee.
“The effect is exacerbated for inmates who are already suffering from mental illness,” Saul said of placement in segregation units.
But some correction officers say the decline in segregation unit offenders is a result of lax prison rules for inmates. The Lebanon prison’s union chapter president Phil Morris said inmates are no longer sent to segregation for swearing at staff or being disrespectful.
“It makes it harder for the officers — they’re the ones that have to deal with that,” Morris said.
Moore said the prison has also started closely tracking violence — mostly fights between inmates — at the prison. Last year, staff only used force on inmates 365 times compared to 535 times in 2012, state statistics show.
Corrections officers now record where and when violence occurs. If they notice more fights outside the prison’s gym, for example, prison staff will step up security there.
“Just like in the community, whenever there’s a lot of crime in an area, what does the police chief do?” Moore said. “He puts a bunch of officers in that area. Hopefully, the crime goes down.”
Folks realize you care
The Lebanon prison has physically changed, too.
Since Moore took over, he’s updated training rooms, installed new employee lockers, added more security cameras and TV for staff to monitor — the prison now has more than 180 cameras — and put in a computer lab for employees.
Some upgrades were long overdue and had been requested for years, according to Morris.
“They’ve made some improvements. The building is 50 years old, there were a lot of things that had been put on the back burner that had finally been done,” Morris said. He added that the union’s relationship with Moore is “better than what it was” compared to the prior warden.
Moore said he’s managed to make such upgrades to the prison while keeping the prison’s $42 million budget the same.
At the same time, turnover of the prison’s 500 employees has dropped from 9.6 percent in 2012 to 5.6 percent. That save taxpayers money on training for new employees; each new corrections officer costs about $5,000 to train.
“Slowly, when you start doing stuff like that, folks start realizing you care,” Moore said of the changes at the prison.
Staff, in fact, were so enthusiastic about Moore’s state honor, roughly 60 of them surprised him during an interview with this newspaper to take a group photo under the Warden of the Year banner they had made for him.