COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - South Carolina officials transferred several hundred maximum-security inmates late last year to a prison where seven prisoners were killed this week in a gang fight. But Corrections Director Bryan Stirling tells The Associated Press that the riot didn’t start in the dorm where those new inmates were housed.
Authorities are still probing the Lee Correctional Institution riot, in which more than 20 inmates were also injured. Ed Bell, an attorney suing the agency, told media outlets that prison officials knew that they were concentrating violent gang members in one place when they transferred several hundred inmates to Lee from McCormick Correctional Institution, creating a situation that led to Sunday night’s violence.
“They put two powder kegs together … (almost as if) they thought it was going to happen,” Bell told the Post and Courier.
But Stirling said the moves happened because staffing was better at Lee, about 130 miles (210 kilometers) away. An entire dorm at Lee was cleared out, and the McCormick inmates were moved in.
Sunday night’s violence took place in three dorms, according to Stirling: F-1, F-3 and F-5. During an interview Wednesday, Stirling said that the transfers were in the F-3 dorm, but the fight didn’t start there and none of the transfers were among the slain or injured.
Since coming to Lee last year, Stirling said it’s possible that some of the McCormick inmates had been sent outside Lee to other institutions, but otherwise all remained in F-3.
Inmates housed together eat, sleep and recreate with their dorm mates, Stirling said. Aside from a handful at a time that might work or attend prison programs together, dorm occupants don’t mingle.
The director said that transfers primarily interacted only with each other and would have only ever been with other inmates a few at a time during work or programs.
“It’s limited,” Stirling said. “Your movements are pretty restrictive.”
But Stirling, who has long voiced his concerns about security threats posed by cellphones smuggled inside to inmates, said that prisoners could have used the contraband devices to communicate and coordinate with each other.
“Why yell across the yard when you can just use a cellphone?” he said.
The AP for months has been communicating with an inmate at Lee who has been using a contraband cellphone. The prisoner - incarcerated in South Carolina for more than five years and speaking on the condition of anonymity because his cellphone is against agency policy - has cast doubt on the assertion that the riot was caused by any recent developments.
“Trust me. You CAN’T add to a problem that is systemic and RIFE … It’s an issue long out-of-control,” he wrote.
He said gang members involved in the riot are already seeking revenge, adding that they’re “already planning retribution against the people responsible for killing their amigos.”
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