Take the most violent, anti-social members of society, crowd them together like stacks of canned goods and then wait. Sooner or later you will get an explosion.

That was supposed to be the lesson Ohio learned from the Lucasville prison riot 10 years ago. But it seems some people in Columbus have forgotten.

On Easter Sunday, 1993, the worst prison riot in Ohio history broke out at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility at Lucasville. When it ended 11 days later, one corrections officer and nine inmates were dead. The prison had suffered $40 million in damage and Ohio vowed to change.

Many changes did occur. A dozen new prisons were built to ease the chronic overcrowding that was one of the contributing causes of the Lucasville violence. The correctional system's budget was tripled, 900 new correctional officers were hired and the state added lots of new education and rehabilitation programs. The expansion was needed, not only to eliminate the double-celling of inmates, which almost guarantees trouble, but to accommodate the burgeoning influx of new prisoners. Ohio had 35,000 people locked up in 1993. Today the number is 45,000.

But Lucasville was a decade ago and the state's finances are in dire shape. The corrections budget has been cut for two years in a row, two prisons have been closed and the entire system is operating at 124 percent of capacity this year.

"We're following a formula that could lead us down the path to another Lucasville," State Sen. Mark Mallory, D-Cincinnati, told the Enquirer.

One of the most ominous developments was elimination of the Correctional Institution Inspection Committee, which investigated 1,500 inmate complaints per month. This kind of oversight is a safety valve that can uncover and correct problems before they reach the exploding point.

After the 1993 riot, many in the General Assembly asked why no one had told them trouble was brewing in the prison system. They will never have that excuse again.

The inspection committee should be restored and solutions must be found to reduce overcrowding. This is a problem that can't be bottled up.