| Ohio State Penitentiary |
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There have been two institutions with the name "Ohio Penitentiary" or "'''Ohio State Penitentiary'''", both were located within that state. CURRENT EDIFICE The current OSP is a 502 inmate capacity Supermax Prison in Youngstown, Ohio , designed to hold the state's most dangerous prisoners who have poor conduct records. Prisoners are locked in Solitary Confinement for 23 hours a day in Concrete Cells measuring 7½ x 11 feet. Each cell has a sink and toilet, small desk, concrete stool and concrete slab with a thin mattress. Since Ohio disqualifes supermax prisoners from eligibility for Parole (One of two such states), prisoners at Youngstown are typically locked under solitary confinement until they "max out" (jailhouse slang for the end of a sentence). The H Unit, together with the Oak Park Heights maximum security facility in Stillwater, Minnesota , was featured in an one hour TV documentary titled "Maximum Security Prisons", produced by Alan Hall (Beyond Productions) for the "On the Inside" series of the Discovery Channel . Legal cases In 2002, the American Civil Liberties Union won the federal case of Wilkinson V. Austin , requiring certain Due Process guidelines be used in determining if prisoners can be moved to Ohio State. The number of inmates dropped after a court-ordered review of individual cases determined that two-thirds of the prisoners did not meet the inclusion guidelines set down. In October 2005, a federal judge ruled that the state can move death row to OSP, while cautioning that he will be monitoring prison officials' efforts to make promised changes to the prison. A majority of Ohio’s death-row prisoners has now been transferred to Youngstown. Before the move, the 194 men on death row were housed at Mansfield Correctional Institution, where death row was moved after the 1993 riots at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville . Executions have not been moved and still take place at the Lucasville facility. ORIGINAL STRUCTURE The original Ohio Penitentiary was a major prison in Columbus, Ohio . It was finally razed in the early 1990s to make way for the Arena District in Columbus. During its reign as Ohio's top prison, the penitentiary hosted many notable prisoners including the murderer James H. Snook (inventor of the "snook hook" of veterinary fame and an Olympic gold medalist in Antwerp) before his execution, and the novelist O. Henry (For Embezzlement ). EXTERNAL LINKS
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