In some ways, the idea of bringing out-of-state prisoners to the New Castle Correctional Facility makes sense. There aren’t (now anyway) nearly enough of the right kind of prisoners from Indiana to fill the 2,416-inmate facility. Meanwhile, other states like Arizona don’t have enough prison space and are trying to avoid building expensive facilities.
So, Arizona sent 630 excess prisoners with medium-security needs to the medium-security facility in New Castle. Indiana has gotten an average of $64 per inmate per day to house them, and Arizona doesn’t have to (for now anyway) embark on a multimillion dollar prison building project.
But the social realities of the arrangement can create a volatile environment that can foment into the sort of violence — or worse — that broke out Tuesday in New Castle. About 500 of the prison’s 1,668 inmates were involved in the riot, which lasted about two hours. Two guards and seven inmates were injured, and fires were set and windows broken by the rioters on prison grounds.
It could have been worse. No buildings were torched. No lives were lost.
Prisoners from Arizona reportedly sparked the riot, some removing their shirts as a sign of defiance and one of them pushing a prison guard to the ground and taking his keys.
Prison officials are reporting that some of the inmates were upset with prison rules — rules that differ from what they had become accustomed to in Arizona. They found after being transported to Indiana that they were to be held in a no-smoking facility. Back in Arizona, they had been allowed to smoke. Also, they found their meal rations to be smaller. They also found themselves 1,500 miles removed from family and friends in Arizona.
Another negative of bringing in prisoners from another state is that they bring their problems with them. Even though the New Castle facility is set up to keep Arizona prisoners isolated from the population of prisoners from Indiana, people have an amazing ability to affect one another across all sorts of barriers. Such was the case Tuesday, when Indiana prisoners rioted after learning that Arizona prisoners had rioted.
The Indiana Department of Correction tacitly recognized that the potential for further problems exists when it transferred 200 inmates from New Castle on Wednesday. Of those, 69 from Arizona were sent to the Wabash Valley prison near Carlisle. A total of 151 New Castle inmates from Indiana were sent to the Plainfield state prison.
The Indiana Department of Correction is now taking a step back from its relationship with Arizona. A new group of 630 prisoners from Arizona was to have arrived within the next several weeks. But even before Tuesday’s riot, Arizona officials had elected to delay the transfer, citing concerns about the amount and setup of security at the New Castle prison.
That does seem like the best approach for Indiana and Arizona, alike, at this point, to analyze the conditions that led to Tuesday’s riot — and study how well the riot was handled — before deciding whether more prisoners from Arizona should be brought to New Castle.
Opinion
EDITORIAL: New Castle prison riot leaves lots of questions to answer
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