White supremacist gangs in prison continue to go unchecked.
The two Black victims of a stabbing by a white supremacist at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville have filed a lawsuit against officers and prison staff for allowing the attack to occur.
Greg Reinke attacked several of his Black fellow inmates with an 8-inch blade he was carrying during recreation time in 2017, thanks to not being strip searched.
The suit seeks $75,000 in damages on behalf of two of the victims, Shamieke Pugh and Maurice Lee. It claims the victims’ civil rights were violated, including that they suffered cruel and unusual punishment because of the inaction of prison guards.
The graphic video of the stabbing that went viral showed no response from prison guards for 10 minutes.
They were laughing and waiting for Black men to die.
The Black inmates were stripped and searched, however, and handcuffed to a table. Reinke, also initially cuffed, somehow got free.
Two guards were named only as Faye and Dalton, and there was a third unidentified officer that reportedly said, “We should just let them die.”
Faye and Dalton stood behind a locked door laughing during the vicious attack. One guard reportedly beat Pugh after the attack while he was pleading for medical assistance.
Reinke, who is already serving a life sentence, has been known to be violent before, against both inmates and guards, and is a member of the Aryan Brotherhood, a violent white supremacist group.
White supremacy inside prisons has been increasing so much that requests were made in 2016 to the Department of Justice to collect statistics on the violent crimes committed by inmates associated with prison gangs — especially murders and bias-motivated crimes, and submit reports with plans of action to address the issue.
The Anti Defamation League (ADL) said there are nearly 100 different active white supremacist prison gangs, and at least 35 states have at least one such gang and many states have to deal with multiple gangs.
According to the ADL, the gangs’ “growth and spread of white supremacist prison gangs has become one of the United States’ most serious — but least talked about — white supremacist problems.”
The Marshall Project collected stories from inmates around the country who said that the racism inside prison walls is more amped than outside and resembles violence from decades ago, thanks to occurrences like the Charlottesville white nationalist rally, and Trump’s rhetoric.
Lucasville prison has a troubled history of violence due to a large population of gangs. The warden is said, in the suit, to be aware of Reinke’s history, and neglected to take precautions to protect other prisoners.
Reinke has been disciplined at least 41 times since April 2006: five times for having homemade knives, seven times for threatening officers, twice for stabbing or trying to stab inmates and once for assaulting a guard, according to prison records.
This attack added 54 more years to his sentence, and he’s on a hunger strike claiming mistreatment by the guards. He said he’s been denied recreation time and lives in a bare cell with nothing to put his clothes on.
