By Charlie Frago,
Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
CUMMINS, Ark. — A 19-year-old corrections officer stabbed five times while escorting a murderer from an isolation cell to the showers at the Cummins Unit on Monday is expected to recover, a prison spokesman said.
The stabbing at the 1,725-bed Lincoln County prison took place at 9:19 a.m. in No. 16 barracks, an isolation wing or “ad-seg” where inmates awaiting disciplinary action or who are deemed dangerous are kept in double cells, segregated from the general inmate population.
The male officer, on the job for less than a year, was escorting Kelvin Barnes, 39, a murderer with a long history of prison violence, from his cell to the shower when the attack occurred, said Dina Tyler, spokesman for the Department of Correction.
Barnes is believed to have slipped out of his handcuffs, pulled out a homemade knife made from wire taken from a prison fence and stabbed the officer repeatedly, Tyler said. The officer was injured on his right side, with punctures to his forearm, underarm, hip, middle finger and an area behind his ear.
Another officer escorting Barnes subdued him.
Investigators have not determined the motive for the stabbing, she said.
The officer was taken to a local hospital and is expected to be released today, she said. Tyler declined to identify the officer or the hospital.
Barnes, convicted of firstdegree murder in Union County in 2000 and serving a 50-year sentence, has been in prison on four different convictions dating to the late 1980s, Tyler said.
She cited Barnes’ discipline record in Arkansas prisons as the reason why he was being held apart from the general population, which lives in dormitory-style barracks. More than 80 incidents, many of them violent, fill his “jacket,” or institutional record, Tyler said.
The prison was put on partial lockdown for about an hour after the stabbing - the first this year of an officer, she said.
Current numbers of inmate assaults on staff were not available, but prison officials told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for an article in March 2006 that 190 officers had been attacked by inmates in the two previous years.
As is routine after a suspected inmate attack, Barnes has been transferred to the neighboring Varner Supermax Unit, the most secure and restrictive environment in the 14,000-inmate system.
The Arkansas State Police visited Cummins on Monday to begin a criminal investigation, Tyler said.
Warden Gaylon Lay did not return a phone call for comment.
Rich Roberts, a spokesman for the International Union of Police Associations, a law-enforcement union that includes corrections officers, said a certain level of violence in prisons is unavoidable but the public is often unaware of the risks undertaken every day by corrections officers.
“A cop working in the worst neighborhood is going to be up against 30-40 percent bad guys. In prison, it’s 100 percent felons,” Roberts said.
Copyright 2007 Arkansas Democrat-Gazette