Chaplain expected riot at Indiana prison

Cara Reiter of NewsLink Indiana reports that this week's riot at New Castle Correctional Institution came as no surprise to Chaplain Michael Osborne:

"Everybody saw it coming, everybody from the top down to the lowest, and they pretended it wasn’t going to be there because what do you do?" Osborne said. "There was even a mock demonstration last week, and it didn’t even make the news because nobody was injured."

About 2 p.m. Tuesday, inmates at the New Castle prison rioted by burning mattresses and gathering outside the walls. The conflict is being blamed on tension between inmates from Indiana and a group that had been transported in from Arizona.

The Arizona inmates came to New Castle in spring, after Gov. Mitch Daniels agreed to accept 1,260 of them for $29.4 million.

Arizona inmates started to arrive at the facility on March 12. When they did, items such as tobacco, pornography and DVD players were confiscated. All of these had been allowed in Arizona.

As of Tuesday, the facility housed 630 Arizona inmates, all of whom were separated from Indiana inmates by a $97,000 fence installed prior to their arrival.

Osborne said he doesn't feel safe at the prison, where he volunteers as a way of doing "penance" as a recovering alcoholic.

"Have you heard the dribble that was on the news?" he said of the riot coverage. "They are making it sound like someone fell down and has scraped their knee. They are saying this is no big event. This is just a little uprising and it was no big deal. Only by the grace of God did the people not die today. Next time they will."