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Mood tense as 20th anniversary of Lucasville approaches (AP)
lengthy article at link aboveCOLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- It's been two decades this month since the longest deadly prison riot in U.S. history broke out in southern Ohio and there's trepidation in the air.
A prisons chief in Colorado and a district attorney in Texas and his wife have been slain.
The ratio of inmates to guards inside Ohio's prisons has crept up again after a dip that followed the 11-day siege at Lucasville's Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in 1993.
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"It wasn't until we actually had the death of (Corrections Officer) Bobby Vallandingham and the riot in Lucasville that people understood that we'd been serious and what we'd been saying was real," Paul Goldberg, past executive director of the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, said. "I fear the same circumstances are emerging today."
Vallandingham was among 12 staff members taken hostage on April 11, 1993, when inmates overtook the prison that sits 10 miles north of the Ohio River. They were exiting the recreation yard on an Easter Sunday when it happened. Vallandingham was killed on the fourth day of the occupation, after his inmate captors had flown a bed sheet out the windows threatening to kill a hostage if certain demands weren't met.
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Christopher Knecht, a former inmate at Lucasville who served time both during the riot and some years afterward, said the two eras can't compare. "The conditions now are nothing like they were," he said. "The only complaints now would be issues dealing with guard-prisoner relationship, classification, property, food, visits and things of that nature - typical complaints found at all prisons."
Yet the anniversary arrives as the national mood within the corrections profession is apprehensive.
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