Guards waited for support to stop deadly prison riot

Law enforcement personnel waited to enter three troubled housing units at the Lee Correctional Institution, a maximum-security prison in Bishopville, South Carolina, about 40 miles east of Columbia, until they could assemble enough officers to deal with the problem safely, the head of the state prison system said Monday.

In the end, no prison guards were injured. But one inmate who witnessed the riot told The Associated Press that felled prisoners’ bodies began stacking up while the guards stayed outside for hours.

Bryan P. Stirling, director of the South Carolina Department of Corrections, defended the response in a news conference Monday. He said that when the first of a series of “inmate-on-inmate altercations” broke out at 7:15 p.m. Sunday, the handful of guards on the scene, knowing they were outnumbered, backed out and called for support. The first large response team did not enter the site of the first fight until 11:30 p.m., he said.

“We are not going to just send one or two officers in there,” Stirling said. “We’re going to gather a force that is safe for all our officers, and we’re going to go in and we’re going to take that dorm back with force. And if there’s any resistance, we’ll be able to put that resistance down immediately.”

When the trouble started, Stirling said later by telephone, there were only two guards on duty in each of the three housing units, and they were armed only with pepper spray. Each housing unit holds about 250 inmates.

Assembling an armed SWAT team in a rural area on a Sunday night takes time, he said.

By the time officials had regained control, the disturbance at the prison was one of the worst of the past quarter-century. And it was an embarrassment for South Carolina, where officials have been trying to address prison problems with new sentencing policies to reduce the inmate population and higher pay for guards to reduce turnover.

Gov. Henry McMaster, a Republican, said that the riot was “unfortunate” but that flare-ups among criminals were inevitable.

“We know that prisons are places where people who have misbehaved on the outside go for rehabilitation, and also to take them from the general population,” he said. “It’s not a surprise when we have violent events take place inside prison.”

Mark Keel, chief of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, said that the exact cause of the riot, and the details of the individual killings, were being investigated. Larry Logan, the coroner for Lee County, South Carolina, where the prison is located, said that autopsies had not yet been completed, but that it appeared that all of the dead suffered stabs and slashes from improvised weapons.

Lee Correctional Institution, which opened in 1993, houses about 1,500 male inmates and has a reputation for trouble. In 2013, Michael McCall, then the warden at Lee, said it was the most dangerous prison in South Carolina. The state uses both publicly and privately run prisons; Lee Correctional is public.

Two officers were stabbed there in a 2015 fight. An inmate was killed during a fight in July 2017, another was stabbed to death in November, and a third was killed in February.

At the time of the riot, Stirling said, there were 44 prison staff members at the facility. Until recently, the figure would have been fewer than 20, he said, but the prison recently began having night shift workers start work earlier and the day shift stay later, so they would both be on hand while prisoners are counted and locked up for the night.

Stirling, who served as chief of staff for Nikki Haley when she was governor, said his department is short-staffed, with 500 fewer front-line officers than it needs. But he said that recent budget increases for the department, supported by Haley and others, have allowed him to increase guards’ pay and begin closing the gap.

New sentencing and corrections policies enacted in 2010 have been easing some of the strain on the state prison system. The Pew Charitable Trusts found that the state’s prison population declined by 14 percent from 2009 to 2016, saving the state $491 million.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Guards waited for support to stop deadly prison riot

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