Union: Inmates needed more security

Two Ohio inmates were poster children for the state’s “supermax” facility in Youngstown when they attacked a correction officer Tuesday, the union representing the guard says.

One had bashed his cellmate to death with a cinder block and then strangled another inmate on the prison bus after pleading guilty to the first crime. The other was handcuffed to a table last year when he stabbed three other inmates, a spokeswoman for the union said.

Yet both were instead at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville on Tuesday morning when they used 10-inch steel shivs to stab Correction Officer Matthew Mathias 32 times, said Sally Meckling, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association.

“They never should have been there in the first place,” Meckling said.

Matthias was flown by helicopter for emergency surgery at hospital in Huntington, West Virginia, where he is in the intensive care unit in stable condition.

State officials only confirmed the attack after being asked about it Wednesday. And, as of Friday, they still hadn’t confirmed the identities of the suspects in the attack on Mathias.

But the union, which has long complained of unsafe conditions at the prison that was the scene of the nation’s longest prison riot in the 1990s, identified the inmates as Casey Pigge, 30, of Chillicothe, and Greg Reinke, 37, of Cleveland. Both men were originally incarcerated for murder.

Asked Friday if the suspected inmates should have been housed in a highersecurity setting, Ohio prisons agency spokeswoman JoEllen Smith didn’t answer directly, saying the incident is still under investigation. She explained in an email that the highest security designation is extended restrictive housing (ERH).

“When a bed becomes available at a site that can house an ERH inmate, the next inmate in the pool to move is placed in that bed,” Smith said in an email. “ERH inmates are usually only moved between the prisons when there is a need to make bed space available or at the specific request of a warden. The one exception still exists in that some inmates with certain mental health conditions cannot be placed at (the Ohio State Penitentiary, known as “super max”) without special approval from the chief psychiatrist.”

The prisons at Youngstown and Lucasville both offer extended restrictive housing, Smith said. However, it’s unclear from her statement whether either of Mathias’ attackers was under extended restrictive housing.

Pigge, if he was one of them, seems a clear candidate.

In 2016 he tricked his cellmate, Luther Wade, into putting on a blindfold and, using a cinder block he’d removed from the wall of their cell, beat Wade to death. In a lawsuit against the state, Wade’s family said Pigge told mental health professionals that he murdered Wade to ensure he’d be housed alone.

Last year, on the bus back from pleading guilty to the crime, Pigge slipped out of part of his belly chain and strangled another inmate, David E. Johnson, 61. He pleaded guilty to that crime in July.

Chis Mabe, a 30-year prison worker who is head of the prison workers union, said that on Tuesday that Pigge, Reinke and Mathias were in an infirmary. Pigge’s hands were cuffed behind his back, but he managed to slip the cuffs under his feet before the stabbing, Mabe said.

“The inmate should never been inside the unit he was,” Mabe said of Pigge. “Both of the inmates have been involved in heinous acts in the last two years.”

He said the steel they made their shanks from came from inmate beds. More-modern, high-security facilities use materials that can’t easily be made into weapons, Mabe said.

Mabe’s union last year held a demonstration at the prison, saying that overcrowding, short staffing and increased drug use among inmates were making the prison a more dangerous place to work. Many of those concerns have gone unaddressed, he said.

“A lot of the staff are really in fear of the conditions,” he said.

Smith, the prisons spokeswoman, said the agency takes staff concerns seriously.

“The safety and security of our staff is our top priority, which is why DRC leadership reached out to union officials last evening to discuss their concerns,” she said.