Lee Correctional Prison Riot
Prison riot in South Carolina, United States
A prison riot at Lee Correctional Institution in Bishopville, South Carolina, United States occurred on April 15, 2018. Starting as a prison cell robbery, violence between prison gangs intensified into a full-blown riot leading to the death of seven prisoners. It was the most violent prison riot in the United States within the last 25 years. On December 3, 2020, 29 Lee Correctional Institution inmates were indicted on murder and mayhem charges by the State of South Carolina.
Investigators found that the riot was caused by gang activity, shortage of staff, overcrowding, and poor living conditions. In 2021, the South Carolina General Assembly approved a $92 million investment into improving South Carolina's prisons, largely as a result of the Lee Correctional Prison Riot. It will be the largest single-year investment in South Carolina's prisons in history.
Background
Lee Correctional is the largest prison for males in the state of South Carolina. It was built in the 1990s as a high-security prison. The campus is split into two yards, the East and the West.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Lee Correctional Prison Riot” as prison riot in South Carolina, United States. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q85850955. Authority coordinates are 42.850, -78.272. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2018, 2020 and 2021.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lee Correctional Prison Riot” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.