On 11 April 1993 prisoners at the South Ohio Correctional Facility at Lucasville began a protest which would become one of the longest in US history. Fifteen years later, five participants remain on death row.

Lucasville
As with almost every prison uprising, the Lucasville protest arose from a period of increasing abuse of prisoners by the authorities. In 1990 a new warden Arthur Tate had been appointed with a remit to exert authoritarian control. Tate cut privileges and educational programmes and began canvassing prisoners to inform on one another.

Massive problems were also caused by overcrowding and enforced cell-sharing. Lucasville was intended to house 1,540 prisoners; when the uprising began, it held 1,820, with 820 doubled up. Many of the complaints about doubling up came from prisoners, both black and white, forced to share with prisoners of a different race. The prison was a dangerous place, with a high level of violence, and many prisoners, who would not otherwise have joined a gang, particularly not one organised along racial or racist lines, did so purely for protection and safety.

The uprising
The specific event that sparked the uprising was Tate’s announcement that prisoners would be tested for TB using a method that involved injecting under the skin a substance which many Muslim prisoners believed contained alcohol. Representatives of the Muslims met Tate and requested an alternative method. Tate did not back down and made it clear that testing would be done by force.

With battle lines drawn, Tate left the prison for the weekend. Again in common with many large-scale prison uprisings, such as that at Strangeways, Manchester in 1990, many commentators believe he expected a protest to take place that would be relatively small and would assist him in requesting more money and resources from the state.

Muslim prisoners did indeed plan a small protest to highlight Tate’s intransigence over the TB testing. They planned to take some guards hostage for a short while, without injuring them, and use them as leverage to allow them to contact higher administration and the media. A similar strategy had worked a few years earlier. However, they had not reckoned on the effect of years of pent-up frustration on all sections of the prison population. The protest escalated rapidly: keys were seized from guards and prisoners freed from cells; guards were beaten as well as captured; prisoners who had been informants were attacked and nine were killed. In his informative book, from which most of this article is drawn, Staughton Lynd writes that ‘The word used by almost every participant to describe these first hours of the uprising is “chaos”.’

The ‘convict race’
Just over half of Lucasville prisoners were black. The majority of the remainder came from poor white communities. Neither group was used to living in a racially integrated situation and both perceived the other with suspicion. According to Lynd ‘Once the uprising began, the overriding problem for the prisoners in rebellion was that what had begun as a protest against the authorities might turn into a race riot among prisoners.’ However, what emerged from the deeply divided prison groupings was a common bond – a shared struggle against shared grievances.

As soon as it was apparent that this was a major disturbance that would not be over in a matter of hours, prisoners began to organise food, medical care, security and internal communication. Lynd writes that representatives of the three organised groups (Muslims, Black Gangster Disciples and Aryan Brotherhood) set aside their differences and ‘began to meet to deal with problems arising from the uprising and to find a strategy to end it’. They discussed demands including replacement of Tate, improved medical care, alternative methods of TB testing, ending overcrowding and forced cell-sharing, an annual phone-call at Christmas, no persecution of perceived ring-leaders. Graffiti written in the prison during the protest reads: ‘Black and White Together 11 Days’, ‘Convict Unity’ and ‘Convict Race’.

On 15 April the prisoners sent two men – one black, one white – to attempt to negotiate with the guards. The white negotiator, George Skatzes, spoke through a megaphone, saying:

‘We are oppressed people, we have come together as one. We are brothers…we are a unit here, they try to make this a racial issue. It is not a racial issue. Black and white alike have joined hands in SOCF and become one strong unit.’

But the state blocked and delayed negotiations, and cut off the electricity and water to the prisoners. The state evidence against four of the Lucasville Five claims that ‘gang leaders’ then met and decided that if the power and water were not restored, they would kill a guard hostage. There is no evidence of such a decision being made at any meeting. Lynd writes that ‘…when a guard was in fact killed that morning, it was not as a result of the morning meeting but because a group of prisoners, in a rogue action, took the matter into their own hands.’

The prison authorities did then negotiate and on 18 April Arthur Tate signed a 21-point agreement, which was a watered-down version of a list of prisoners’ demands submitted to him. On 21 April the remaining hostages were released and 407 prisoners surrendered.

The Lucasville Five
The state was desperate to break the precarious unity that had been forged and exact revenge for the death of Officer Vallandingham. Police officers set about playing classic mindgames on those seen as leading protagonists, attempting to persuade them others had already ‘snitched’ and they could only save themselves from death sentences by doing likewise.

The Lucasville Five are three black men, Siddique Abdullah Hasan, Namir Abdul Mateen and Bomani Shakur, and two white men, George Skatzes and Jason Robb. They face the death penalty because they were among those who tried to negotiate a peaceful end to the revolt and because they did not give in to the pressure to inform on others

Their trials were held in a racist atmosphere, as Siddique Hasan has described ‘…the State’s fear and hatred of my religion… became evident when, during the course of my trial in Cincinnati, the State repeatedly focused on my race, religion and Islamic attire - all to create an atmosphere of racial prejudice and Islamophobia before a predominately white and Catholic jury’. The capital trials were held in front of ‘death qualified’ juries; that is juries made up of people who had already testified that they were not against the death penalty.

Four of the Lucasville Five are now at Youngstown ‘supermax’ prison, where they are kept in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day in concrete cells measuring 7½ x 11 feet.

The Five all have pending appeals in the Federal District Court. Several others who were sentenced to life imprisonment have no appeals left and will only be freed if the Parole Board directs their release. Campaigners are calling for an amnesty for all those sentenced for allegedly participating in the Lucasville uprising.

For more information read Staughton Lynd’s book Lucasville – the untold story of a prison uprising Temple University Press, 2004.

For updates on the continuing campaign to free the Lucasville Five, go to
 http://freehasan.org or  http://www.prisonersolidarity.org/lucasville.htm

You can write to the Lucasville Five:
Siddique Abdullah Hasan # R130-559,
Bomani Shakur (aka Keith Lamar) #317-117,
Jason Robb #308-919
Namir Abdul Mateen (aka James Were) #173-245
Ohio State Penitentiary
878 Coitsville-Hubbard Road
Youngstown OH 44505-4635, USA.


George Skatzes #173-501
Mansfield Correctional Institute
PO Box 788
Mansfield OH 44901-0788, USA

FIRST PUBLISHED IN FIGHT RACISM! FIGHT IMPERIALISM! 202 APRIL/MAY 2008