Arizona prisoners transferred to Indiana’s New Castle Correctional Facility face great stress from being separated from loved ones, disrupted from schooling and other programs, and might have felt they were being punished for good behavior, advocates and others said.
Barely six weeks after the first of about 630 Arizona prisoners arrived at the Indiana prison more than 1,500 miles from their home state, a riot April 24 involving the out-of-state inmates left two prison staffers and seven inmates injured and fires burning in a courtyard.
Donna Leone Hamm, director of Tempe-based Middle Ground Prison Reform, said prisoners and their families have complained to her group that some inmates were removed from their Arizona cells with little advance warning and forced to leave behind televisions, books and other items.
“The prison guards came literally in the middle of the night and ordered prisoners to pack up their belongings and they were moved to Indiana,” Hamm said
Many also were disrupted from education programs, counseling for problems such as chemical dependency and anger, and other programming, Hamm said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.
“This contract with Indiana was ill-conceived because of the distance, but also with very little preparation for the inmates who were to be moved,” Hamm said.
Then there’s the separation from their families and other loved ones. Hamm said many of the prisoners’ families did not learn about the transfers until the prisoners had saved enough money to buy paper and postage to write home.
“That’s the big stress right there: They’re separated from their families,” said Celia Sweet, executive director of the Indiana chapter of the advocacy group CURE, or Citizens United for Rehabilitation of Errants.
Many of the factors behind the riot remained unknown April 24, but Hamm said that in the past transfers to other states, affected Arizona inmates sometimes created disciplinary problems so prison officials would return them to Arizona.
“I’m sure that’s a potential plan that some of them may have had,” Hamm said.
Tensions among the Arizona prisoners were fueled by the belief among some that they were effectively being punished for good behavior, since states accepting out-of-state prisoners generally exclude those with disciplinary problems.
It remained unknown how the two states would deal with inmates involved in the riot. Indiana Correction Commissioner J. David Donahue said additional transfers were temporarily on hold.
The New Castle prison was holding 630 inmates from Arizona, along with about 1,050 Indiana inmates.
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