Cleveland Plain Dealer...
Ohio to move its death row inmates
By Reginald Fields  
October  5, 2011 

COLUMBUS, Ohio -- Ohio’s death row is moving again. 

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction announced today that it would consolidate its two death row locations into a single spot, moving condemned inmates to the re-opened Chillicothe Correctional Institution. 

The department houses 145 death row inmates at prisons in Mansfield and Youngstown. The current death row living quarters at those prisons will be converted into 300 maximum security cells that will house the most violent inmates. 

It is part of prisons Director Gary Mohr’s plan to create a new, three-tiered prison system that essentially segregates inmates who cause violence within prisons, many of them gang-affiliated prisoners. Mohr says putting violent inmates into high-security cells will help improve safety and encourage more inmates to take advantage of rehabilitation programming. 

Ohio also has two death row inmates with serious medical ailments who are kept at a prison medical center in the Columbus area and one female death row inmate who is housed at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville. Those three inmates will remain where they are. 

This is the fifth time death row has been moved since 1885, the last move coming in 2005 when the department split its death row between Mansfield Correctional Institution and the Ohio State Penitentiary in Youngstown. 

The death row relocation will be completed in January. 

Read it at the Cleveland Plain Dealer