By all accounts, bloody violence inside many of Ohio’s public and private prison walls has intensified out of control in recent years.

In Youngstown, the Northeast Ohio Correctional Center has logged more than 15 inmate stabbings — including at least one such fatal attack — since the start of last year as well as multiple attacks on correctional officers, some of whom required hospitalization.

In Southwest Ohio, the Lebanon Correctional Institution bears the dubious distinction of owning among the highest rates of violence toward guards and other staff, with 60 such attacks against staff reported in one recent year.

Then in Union Township at the high-security Ross Correctional Institution, an inmate ruthlessly and savagely attacked officer Andrew Lansing on Christmas Day 2024, denting his skull and causing a fatal brain bleed.

That horrendous death quickly precipitated the birth of “Andy’s Law,” the name of Ohio House Bill 338. That comprehensive prison reform legislation sponsored by Republican state lawmakers U.S. Reps. Mark Johnson of Chillicothe and Phil Plummer of Dayton passed the House late last month in surprisingly strong (82-3) bipartisan fashion.

Most of its core principles have merit and warrant similar bipartisan backing in the upper chamber of the state Legislature. Among its most notable provisions to make Ohio’s network of prisons safer for correction officers, staff members, visitors and inmates themselves include:

● Requiring a sentence of life in prison without parole if an inmate murders an employee.

● Requiring a seven-year sentence for inmates who commit a felonious assault against correctional officers. It is noteworthy and appropriate that such a sentence must be consecutive to time already being served, not concurrent with it as that would effectively result in no added punishment.

● Requiring a three-year sentence for throwing bodily fluids, such as inmate urine, at officers, an offense that according to witnesses at recent hearings on the bill sometimes goes totally unpunished.

The legislation also includes a provision to strengthen drug smuggling into prisons by allowing higher-ranking staff members to immediately detain individuals bringing illicit narcotics into the lockups. It also mandates K-9 units in all prisons to expedite detection of drugs. Considering drug use by inmates often fuels disruptive and violent behavior, such protocols should have been in place long ago.

In a broader sense, allowing drug-sniffing dogs in prisons “will serve as an invaluable resource for officer safety, threat prevention and contraband detection, thereby making Ohio’s prisons safer,” Darren Price of the Emergency Management Division of the Department of Public Safety and the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction testified in support of the bill.

Jeffrey Noble, a retired warden who worked 33 years in state prisons, reinforced the dire need for the strict Andy’s Law reforms in his testimony in support of the bill: “The Ohio prison system had normalized violence and drug possession / usage in the prisons in the last seven years. The language in this law would make changes to reverse that trend.”

For all of its stellar assets, however, Andy’s Law is not without its liabilities. Several representatives of institutions ranging from the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio, Returning Citizens and the Ohio Public Defenders Office found flaws in some of the less publicized tenets deep inside the bill.

One of those valid criticisms lies in HB 338’s destruction of higher education and some vocational rehabilitation training for Ohio’s higher security prisons.

Considering that prison life represents a mix of punishment, confinement and rehabilitation, the House-passed version of Andy’s Law would strike a blow at that latter goal. As Gary Daniels, legislative director for the Ohio ACLU, told state legislators, the more likely outcome of HB 338 is “people exiting Ohio’s prison system less equipped to adjust to outside life, find employment and keep themselves out of further trouble.”

Results from studies conducted by the RAND Corp. and the Vera Institute of Justice support Daniels’ assertions. Those studies showed a 43% to 66% reduction in recidivism among people who accessed higher education opportunities while incarcerated. Such programs, the studies concluded, save taxpayer dollars, reduce recidivism and make communities safer.

We therefore urge state senators to tweak House Bill 338 by removing the ban on educational and retraining opportunities for prisoners. Once doing so, senators should approve and Gov. Mike DeWine should sign Andy’s Law into Ohio law to make Buckeye State jails and prisons safer and to ensure Andrew Lansing’s death will not have been in vain.