OHIO PRISONS Supermax to get death row?

The Youngstown Supermax is at the center of a U.S. Supreme Court case.
COLUMBUS -- The state prisons department is considering moving its 200-prisoner death row to the Ohio State Penitentiary, the Supermax prison on Coitsville-Hubbard Road in Youngstown.
Andrea Dean, a spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, confirmed that talks on moving death row inmates from the Mansfield Correctional Institution were in "informal stages" now.
"There's nothing concrete," Dean said Thursday. "It was just a thought that was thrown out."
Numbers
There are 201 inmates on death row, Dean said.
Six killers facing the death penalty are already housed at the Supermax, including four inmates involved in the 1993 riots at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville that spurred the construction of the Ohio State Penitentiary.
An additional 194 male prisoners are on death row in Mansfield, according to news reports. One female death row inmate would continue to be held at the Ohio Reformatory for Women in Marysville, Dean said.
The Death House, where condemned inmates are executed by lethal injection, would remain at the Lucasville prison, Dean said.
Opened in 1998, the Supermax is designed for 502 prisoners who spend most of the day alone in cells with solid doors. The lights are never shut off, and amenities are scarce. Though it is described by the prisons department as being the home of the "worst of the worst," half the current prisoners are listed by the corrections department as level 1 or medium security who are subject to a far less restrictive living environment.
Yet they are being held at a facility where it costs $157 per day to house a prisoner, vs. $57 per day at a typical medium-security facility such as Mansfield.
Corrections officials were unavailable to discuss whether moving 200 death row inmates to Youngstown would mean shipping hundreds of other prisoners, presumably those classified as medium security, to other state prisons.
Supreme Court case
The Youngstown Supermax is at the center of a case to be heard this spring by the U.S. Supreme Court on whether assignment to a supermaximum-security prison is by itself so significant a change from normal incarceration that there needs to be a more formal hearing process of assigning prisoners to it.
The court is also being asked to decide whether there needs to be a more transparent process for a prisoner to work his way out of a supermax with good behavior.
The case came out of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of present and former inmates. A federal district court in Akron ruled in 2002 that the standards were "arbitrary" and noted that many prisoners were sent to the supermax merely because the Ohio built such a large supermaximum security prison well beyond its needs.
Though the state agreed to make changes to satisfy health-care issues raised at the trial and built an outdoor recreation area, the state appealed on the issue of whether its process of assigning prisoners to the Supermax were arbitrary. In February 2004, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the verdict, and the state appealed to the Supreme Court.
Of the 465 prisoners assigned to the Supermax, 55 of them are level 5 and 180 are level 4, designations that subject them to the tough enviroment of a Supermax. But 230 are considered level 1 or medium security, whose status at the Supermax is more unusual. If the state loses before the Supreme Court, it is possible that they would have been compelled to move many of the medium-security prisoners anyway.