Ohio lawmakers introduce a bill to reform the prison system, as the state’s prisons suffer from staff shortages, rug-smuggling business

Proposed legislation aims to fix the prisons in the state, where there are not enough staff who would be willing to stop drugs from being smuggled inside the facilities, as well as inmates dying.

House Bill 338, which was named Andy’s law after Ross Correctional Institution officer Andy Lansing, who was killed by an inmate on Christmas Day in 2024, passed the state House and is currently pending before the state Senate, according to The Dayton Daily News.

The bill was introduced by state Reps. Phil Plummer, R-Butler Twp., and Mark Johnson, R-Chillicothe, who said that the state’s prisons are “the most dangerous places of employment” in the entire country.

The news source reported that Ohio’s state prisons are understaffed, with nine of Ohio’s 24 prisons posting vacancy rates above 10%.

The lawmakers introduced the bill to ensure that there will be “more and increased mandatory minimums for assaults on prison staff, harsher charges for pushing drugs, and mandatory sentences for any inmate who ‘harasses’ another person with bodily substances.”

The bill would also revoke educational access for inmates in higher-security institutions and introduce minimum qualifications for Ohio’s prison director, who, according to Plummer and Johnson, must have at least five years of experience at any prison or three years at a high-security prison.

The latest Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction director, Annette Chambers-Smith, who recently resigned from her job to work in Republican Gov. Mike DeWine’s administration, was criticized by House Speaker Matt Huffman, R-Lima, who called her job performance at that job “a big disappointment” because she was too lenient on the state prisoners.

“When you end up in the state prison, it’s because you did some really, really bad things and usually a lot of them,” Huffman told the Dayton news outlet. “I’m not steeped enough, at least right now getting asked this question, but I think it’s been a big disappointment. Governor DeWine is a thoughtful guy; hopefully, he will come up with somebody who’s gonna begin to look at the prison system as a different kind of place than the outgoing director.”

Meanwhile, prison staff and visitors are using the understaffed facilities to their advantage by smuggling drugs inside the prisons, according to multiple reports by The Columbus Dispatch. The most commonly found drug in Ohio prisons is drug-soaked paper, sold in confetti-sized hits.

Among the side effects are vomiting, twitching, convulsing, aggression and psychosis, according to The Dispatch. The inmate could also die after consuming the drug.

Due to prisons being understaffed, inmates also die from other causes, such as Ashley Baldwin, an inmate who died inside the prison after being neglected by the staff, even though she had previously complained about feeling pain in her kidney.

“Knowing that their health is declining, you should have been able to transfer them to the hospital — she was transferred in past years,” Robert Baldwin, her brother, told The Dayton Daily News. “Instead, it was a holiday weekend, there’s call-offs, they’re short-staffed, they don’t want to deal with it. So (they’re) just like, ‘Okay, go to your room and die.’”