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.