Inmates take guards hostage at Delaware prison

Law enforcement officials are responding to a hostage situation at Delaware’s maximum security prison, according to Wednesday reports.

Geoffrey Klopp, president of the Correctional Officers Association of Delaware, reportedly said he had been told that inmates at the James T. Vaughn Correctional Center in Smyrna had taken prison guards hostage.

The ongoing situation resulted in all of the state’s prisons being put on lockdown, though a spokeswoman for the Department of Corrections told the Associated Press that it is an isolated incident and does not pose any threat to public safety.

{mosads}The spokeswoman, Jayme Gravell, said firefighters were called on Wednesday morning in response to reports of smoke. It was not immediately clear whether there was a fire at the facility.

The hostage situation is not the first such incident at the prison. In 2004, an inmate took a prison counselor hostage and sexually assaulted her before he was shot and killed by a corrections officer.

The News Journal reported Wednesday afternoon that it had received a phone call from a woman claiming her fiancé was an inmate in the prison who had been taken hostage. The woman then patched a man onto the line who claimed he had been told to relay his hostage-takers’ demands to the paper.

The man said the inmates demanded better treatment at the prison. A police officer had been stabbed, he told the newspaper, adding that he was unaware of how many hostage takers there were, because his face had been covered.

—Updated at 4:03 p.m.