MICHIGAN CITY – Indiana’s prison officials say a recent boost in starting pay for correctional officers has quickly increased the number of job applicants and nearly erased serious staffing shortages.

But some say an incident last month in Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, in which a correctional officer was killed and another wounded, might be the latest symptom of chronic understaffing in the state’s prisons and lingering restrictions tied to those staff shortages, which have been compounded by the pandemic.

On Feb. 21, 57-year-old Lt. Eugene Lasco was stabbed to death by an inmate when he went to the rescue of 22-year-old Sgt. Padrick Schmitt, who had been attacked, Indiana’s Department of Correction said in a news release. Indiana State Police are investigating the attacks; no charges against the inmate, 38-year-old Tymetri Campbell, have yet been filed, and details of what led to the attack have not been released.

LaPorte County Coroner Lynn Swanson said Lasco died after he was stabbed with a homemade knife several times in the neck and chest.

Two other ISP correctional officers were fired in the days that followed for failing to act during the incident, an Indiana personnel spokesman said: Perry L. Baldridge, who had worked there for a little more than a year, and Kendrick Anderson, who had been hired in late 2018.

Some with ties to ISP, including a former correctional officer, point to staff shortages leading to a culture of poorly trained and monitored officers and increasing the danger inside the prisons.

Kimberly Mearns, a former ISP officer for about three years before she quit in 2019, has been posting on YouTube and other social media about her views of necessary reforms in Indiana prisons for about a year, to a growing following. But after Lasco’s death, she is especially angry and frustrated.

Lasco was Mearns’ lieutenant while she worked her 12-hour shifts, mostly in ISP’s D cell house, the segregation unit. She recalls that Lasco did his job well, and she isn’t surprised he would jump in to help a fellow officer.

But Mearns, who says she still keeps in contact with former co-workers, believes chronic understaffing leads to burnout and constant turnover.

To work as a correctional officer in Indiana, you must be at least 18, have a GED or high school diploma and have a driver’s license.

Mearns wanted to use the position as a stepping stone to a traditional police officer job, she said. She was a recently divorced single mother facing eviction and needed the work. Her starting wage in 2016 was $14 an hour, but copious amounts of overtime hours were encouraged.

The 32-year-old from Portage says she started the job as many do, believing that those who have committed crimes deserve lousy prison conditions. But experience taught her differently, that treating prisoners poorly only makes it worse for guards and prisoners alike.

The Department of Correction has been so desperate to fill the slots, she said, they’re forced to lower their standards on candidates, and they’re rehiring people who have been terminated or otherwise left. Mearns said she was recently contacted with an offer to return, which she turned down.

The Rev. David Link, a former University of Notre Dame law school dean who was ordained as a priest after he retired and has spent two decades ministering to Indiana prisoners, said even before the pandemic that violence was increasing in ISP as a result of shortages in staff to monitor prisoner activity.

Now, after steeper shortages heightened by the pandemic, nearly a year without visitors or volunteers, and a lockdown of several months, violence at ISP is disturbingly rampant, the priest said. It has been nearly a year since he has been allowed in, but he says still hears what’s happening there.

Tina Church, a Mishawaka private investigator who has worked with prisoners since the 1990s, said she too has heard increasingly disturbing news out of Indiana prisons, especially ISP.

Being locked down for so many months there has meant that prisoners are confined to their cells 23 hours a day and sometimes even denied that hour a day to shower or go outside, Church said. “All these men are going absolutely crazy there because of these issues.

“They’re so short on staff, it’s just out of control over there,” she said.

DOC spokeswoman Annie Goeller said she could not confirm the long lockdown at ISP, but “we have had to implement restrictions on movements within facilities throughout the state at times due to COVID-19, and issues related to it.”

State police are also investigating the stabbing death of an ISP inmate in January. Goshen resident Daniel Heflin, who was serving 90 years for a 2012 murder, was stabbed in the right side of his head.

Heflin’s was the third prisoner homicide since 2017, the Times of Northwest Indiana reported. Few details have been released in that case.

Nationwide shortage

News outlets have increasingly reported correctional staff shortages in jails and prisons all over the country.

Michigan DOC spokesman Chris Gautz said last month that officials there, too, have struggled with officer shortages, mostly fueled by large numbers of retirees but augmented by the pandemic.

Starting pay there is $18.39 an hour, negotiated with a union, but some officers earn more than $100,000 with overtime pay.

With pandemic shortages, some retirees came back to fill in, Gautz said, “when they saw their colleagues were in need.”

Michigan recently closed one of its prisons because of declining populations there, he said, credited to policy changes like a truth-in-sentencing law and some judges embracing alternative sentencings, Gautz said. Still, lingering shortages have driven more targeted advertising campaigns to attract new officers.

Last month, Wisconsin legislators heard testimony about $60 million paid in overtime costs to cover 15 to 40 percent staff shortages in prisons there.

Back in Indiana

Goeller said Indiana’s DOC paid $32.99 million in overtime in fiscal year 2020 and $32.7 million the year before. Although the National Guard was called in “rarely” to help with COVID-related shortages, she said, “in most instances, when a facility is short-staffed, overtime is used to fill any gaps. DOC also has several other options, including reducing or restricting movements of offenders to specific areas.”

But since starting pay increased to $19 an hour in November, Goeller said, officer shortages that were as high as 20 percent in a few facilities have eased across the state. Six of 21 facilities have improved to having fewer than 10 percent vacancies.

“ISP does not have a staffing shortage, including in the unit where the incident happened,” said Goeller, who declined to provide turnover rates, saying they fluctuate.

But Mearns, Link and Church reacted with skepticism to the claim that ISP does not have a shortage of correctional officers; indeed, a correctional officer job posting at ISP dated March 3 is among about 20 correctional staff openings that have been posted on the state’s website this year.

The “Now hiring” sign that has sat outside the prison for years is still in place, Mearns pointed out.

An Indiana DOC report said as of Dec. 31, custody staff at its adult facilities numbered 3,190 with 891 vacancies. At ISP, those numbers were 287 custody staff and 66 vacancies.

The Jan. 31 report, posted last week, showed an increase to 381 custody staff at ISP and 78 vacancies.

Indiana officials have also beefed up recruiting efforts, including a special Facebook page and monthly virtual recruiting events.

But unlike in Wisconsin, Indiana’s General Assembly does not appear to be aware of staffing issues or other prison concerns.

The General Assembly’s interim study committee on Corrections and Criminal Code met last fall, but according to its agendas and meeting minutes, DOC officials appeared only to discuss prisoner population rates and educational credit time. The committee was focused on the definition of consent in sexual encounters and providing better mental health services.

Link, who said he has been “double-Pfizered,” is champing at the bit to return to his chaplain duties. The hour a week men used to be able to spend in peace during church services, along with other programs on hiatus, provided necessary outlets from prison life, he said.

When inmates are sequestered in cells for days at a time, many unable to contact anyone outside, and staffing shortages mean delays in providing meals and even such essentials as toilet paper, Church says.

Mearns, Link and Church wish the public — and lawmakers — would demand more be done to improve the situation in the state’s prisons.