Posted on 02/01/17
| News Source: Delaware On Line
Department of Correction Response Teams and the Delaware State Police responded to a hostage situation Wednesday morning at James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna, according to Jayme Gravell, a spokeswoman.
All Delaware prisons went on lockdown because of the situation.
Dozens of police vehicles, as well as ambulances, continued to pour into the entrance to Vaughn Correctional Center near Smyrna. Helicopters were also circling over the prison and the nearby areas.
Rep. William Carson, a member of the House Corrections Committee, said he had been told it was an “apparent hostage situation.”
“The inmates have taken over a building,” he said.
Carson said details were still scarce and said he had no more information.
DOC released no other details. Gravell said it is protocol to lock down all state prisons when an emergency occurs at one of them.
Staff were on scene trying to gather details and handle the situation, Gravell said. Area firefighters were called to the scene, she said, but the particulars of what prompted the call were not immediately available.
While few details have been released, officials will surely review what procedures were in place that created this situation just as they did when inmate Scott A. Miller abducted and raped a prison counselor on July 12, 2004.
Miller, a convicted serial rapist, was serving a 699-year prison sentence at the Delaware Correctional Center – now Vaughn Correctional Center – when he passed through two security checkpoints armed with a homemade knife before taking Cassandra Arnold hostage for nearly seven hours, sexually assaulting her during the ordeal.
The standoff ended when a corrections officer shot Miller to death.
A task force investigating security lapses at the prison found that a staff shortage at the prison, and other state penal facilities, forced officers to work large amounts of overtime.
The investigation also made dozens of recommendations for improving the safety of employees and inmates there, including the need for additional cameras to properly monitor prison inmates, and need for better communications equipment for correction officers and vacant correction officers positions needed to be filled as quickly as possible.
The incident brought promises that changes would occur in the state's prison system, but in a 2006 interview with The News Journal Arnold didn’t think anything had been done.
Arnold and the state finalized a $1.65 million out-of-court settlement in 2006.