LEWISBURG — The Lewisburg Penitentiary guard stabbed twice in a melee Sunday is out of danger, but the staffing situation at the institution is critical.

Warden B.A. Bledsoe won’t come to the phone and federal Bureau of Prisons officials in Washington, D.C., send numbers meant to be comforting, but those inside the penitentiary talk frankly.

Since January, Lewisburg has received “the worst of the worst” criminals, while dropping the security procedures that held them at bay elsewhere, said Daniel Bensinger, a veteran corrections officer and president of Local 148 of the American Federation of Government Employees.

Whenever one of these vicious inmates was moved from a cell to showers or elsewhere inside previous institutions, it was with three guards.

“One officer on the left, one of his right and one behind with some sort of night stick,” Bensinger said. “Today, at Lewisburg, we have one staff escorting one inmate.” And some of those guards, he said, have little or no relevant training.

Some of them are “augmentation” personnel, drawn from the ranks of secretaries, social workers and other civilians.

In Sunday’s incident, Bensinger said, two brand new officers were opening the door to a cell that housed two inmates. The prisoners rushed the door and flung it out, and the officers jumped back. Then one prisoner, with his hands cuffed behind his back, body slammed one of the guards, Bensinger said.

Being willing to tear up his wrists, the other prisoner had gotten his cuffs off. He pulled a handmade weapon and stabbed the other guard. The weapon, Bensinger said, was crafted from the button that turned on the hot water in the sink and its inner shaft. It was about the size of a pen, and Bensinger said another officer estimated one and a half to two inches of it could have punctured the officer’s skin.

The guard was treated at a hospital and released, Bensinger said. Four other officers who tried to come to the rescue also were injured, but less severely. One officer, with a baton, knocked the weapon out of the prisoner’s hand and got him to the ground.

The cuffed inmate ran down the hallway, where he fought with other officers.

It was the second violent incident at the Kelly Township institution in less than a week.

Bensinger, who has been a corrections officer for 24 years, said staffing levels at the penitentiary are dangerously low.

Traci Billingsley, spokesman for the Bureau of Prisons in Washington, and her counterpart at Lewisburg, Scott Finley, sent e-mails with the same wording Monday: “... Staffing levels have increased at Lewisburg ... and currently the Correctional Services Department has 95.6 percent of their positions filled.”

“That’s because management sets the number they feel is 100 percent,” Bensinger said. “They set it at 294. But that’s not what the union would call 100 percent. We need 350 to do the job.”

On Monday, 264 were employed, he said.

Billingsley and Finley also said: “Overall, the inmate to staff ratio is 3-to-1, which compares favorably with the bureau’s overall inmate to staff ratio at penitentiaries, which is 4-to-1.”

Bensinger said: “There are about 1,200 staff and 400 inmates, but among ‘staff,’ they are counting food service personnel, educators and workers in recreation, maintenance and medical care. When we open the door to a cell, that doesn’t give us three officers to each prisoner. The dentist is in the dentist’s office.”

He said management just designated six troublesome inmates out of the entire population for “three-man hold.”

The union is saying, he said, that all of the inmates need the designation. “We need three officers to one inmate to face this caliber of violent prisoner.”

Bensinger has seen the conditions at Lewisburg change.

“It’s making the other prisoners safer,” said Keith Hill, national vice president of the AFGE for District 3, which includes Pennsylvania. About six weeks ago, Bensinger gave Hill a tour.

During a shakedown in the cafeteria, they found two dozen weapons. They were hidden behind the end caps of tables, in kitchenware and in appliances. They also were found in the drain, on top of the oven and behind the sink.

Most prisoners, he said, make some kind of weapon to protect themselves from other inmates. “The group we are now housing use them on the staff,” he said.

They are fashioned from just about anything, too, including bed parts and the tips of batteries.

At the prisoners’ former institutions, he said, procedures included X-rays for metal hidden in the body. At Lewisburg, there’s a metal detector in the hallway, Bensinger said, but no one to monitor it.

There also is no one to gather intelligence on who’s making weapons.

Hill said 150 inmates being watched by one corrections officer is ludicrous. He said they carry “no mace, nothing for self-protection but a walkie-talkie.”

He said Pennsylvania’s senators and congressmen know of the problem and are working to get the funds for adequate staffing, but politics is a slow business.

Warden Bledsoe and Harley Lappin, Bureau of Prisons director, are not making waves, Bensinger said, because they are “good soldiers.”

You’ll never hear them say they’re understaffed, he said. “They fear for their jobs too,” he added.

Secretaries and clerks put up with being asked to do dangerous inmate supervision because they have seniority to protect and families to support, he said.

Recently, Bensinger said, he witnessed one of the “augmentation” staff trying to find a key to open a door. “She must have had 30 keys on a key ring, and it took her five to seven minutes to find the right one. There were two corrections officers behind that door. If something had broken out, they’d be dead.”

Last year, corrections officer Jose Rivera was stabbed to death at the U.S. Penitentiary in Atwater, Calif. On Saturday, an improvised explosive device went off inside the Victorville Federal Penitentiary in California. No one was injured in that incident, Billingsley said, but it detonated upon discovery during a routine search.

Hill and Bensinger said the AFGE had high hopes that the Obama administration would replace Lappin, a Bush administration appointee. So far, it hasn’t happened. Meanwhile, 7,600 new prisoners are expected in the system next year, Hill said. A new prison will house up to 1,500 of those, but there will be 6,000 more to be absorbed elsewhere.

Sen. Arlen Specter wrote to Lappin early in October, backing AFGE suggestions, including equipping officers with nonlethal weapons to defend themselves, like pepper spray, and supplying stab-proof vests.

Specter is on the Senate Appropriations Committee, which would be involved in securing funding for hiring more prison staff. U.S. Rep. Chris Carney has petitioned the House Appropriations Committee to earmark more than $1 billion in extra federal corrections funds.

According to union figures, 9,000 new corrections officers need to be hired across the nation to bring staffing to 100 percent, or the level it considers safe.

Bensinger said: “Ask the public to say a prayer to protect their officers and to give lawmakers the wisdom they need.”