Modern Prisons in Virginia

The Virginia Department of Corrections has built numerous new prisons in the 1990's. More prison beds were required by court decisions forcing better treatment of prisoners, and the state anticipated a need to house more prisoners resulting from "get tough" policies on crime. Most significantly, the General Assembly abolished parole under then-Governor George Allen, and funded new prisons to house inmates longer until their full sentences were completed. Virginia even keeps prisoners at a private correctional institution, Lawrenceville Correctional Center.

note the absence of state prison facilities in Northern Virginia
Source: Virginia Department of Corrections

The surge of prison capacity created more jail cells faster than Virginia judges created prisoners. The excess capacity in modern prisons was created in part by a lower-than-expected crime rate. Project Exile and other deterrents my have been effective, or perhaps the aging population was less inclined to commit crimes (or smarter about not getting caught...). The good economy in the "dot com" boom may have made it easier to earn money than to steal it, or perhaps Virginia failed to catch the first crooks that shifted to e-crime.

Other states, which had the opposite situation, contracted with Virginia to house their inmates. New Mexico, Connecticut, and the District of Columbia were the most visible in this rent-a-cell program. This generated revenue for Virginia, and met the needs of the states that had exceeded population capacity of their jails.

The "supermax" prisons are located in Southwest Virginia, where the local demographics are substantially different from urban areas. As a result, the diversity of the guard force does not match the racial petterns of the criminal population in the facility. Out-of-state legislators have nothing to lose by blaming Virginia's correctional officers whenever an inmate from their region is injured or dies in a Virginia jail, and even suggesting racial bias. (Connecticut had its prisoners moved to the Greensville Correctional Center in 2001, before returning them all to Connecticut in 2004.)

The warden at Wallens Ridge State Prison filed suit against New Haven, Connecticut newspapers after they portrayed him unfavorably in articles about treatment of the Connecticut prisoners. As described in a 2002 appeals court decision¹

Sometime in the late 1990s the State of Connecticut was faced with substantial overcrowding in its maximum security prisons. To alleviate the problem, Connecticut contracted with the Commonwealth of Virginia to house Connecticut prisoners in Virginia's correctional facilities. Beginning in late 1999 Connecticut transferred about 500 prisoners, mostly African-American and Hispanic, to the Wallens Ridge State Prison, a "supermax" facility in Big Stone Gap, Virginia. The plaintiff, Stanley Young, is the warden at Wallens Ridge. Connecticut's arrangement to incarcerate a sizeable number of its offenders in Virginia prisons provoked considerable public debate in Connecticut. Several Connecticut legislators openly criticized the policy, and there were demonstrations against it at the state capitol in Hartford.

Connecticut newspapers, including defendants the New Haven Advocate (the Advocate) and the Hartford Courant (the Courant), began reporting on the controversy. On March 30, 2000, the Advocate published a news article, written by one of its reporters, defendant Camille Jackson, about the transfer of Connecticut inmates to Wallens Ridge. The article discussed the allegedly harsh conditions at the Virginia prison and pointed out that the long trip to southwestern Virginia made visits by prisoners' families difficult or impossible. In the middle of her lengthy article, Jackson mentioned a class action that inmates transferred from Connecticut had filed against Warden Young and the Connecticut Commissioner of Corrections. The inmates alleged a lack of proper hygiene and medical care and the denial of religious privileges at Wallens Ridge. Finally, a paragraph at the end of the article reported that a Connecticut state senator had expressed concern about the presence of Confederate Civil War memorabilia in Warden Young's office. At about the same time the Courant published three columns, written by defendant-reporter Amy Pagnozzi, questioning the practice of relocating Connecticut inmates to Virginia prisons. The columns reported on letters written home by inmates who alleged cruelty by prison guards. In one column Pagnozzi called Wallens Ridge a "cut-rate gulag." Warden Young was not mentioned in any of the Pagnozzi columns.

On May 12, 2000, Warden Young sued the two newspapers, their editors (Gail Thompson and Brian Toolan), and the two reporters for libel in a diversity action filed in the Western District of Virginia. He claimed that the newspapers' articles imply that he "is a racist who advocates racism" and that he "encourages abuse of inmates by the guards" at Wallens Ridge. Young alleged that the newspapers circulated the allegedly defamatory articles throughout the world by posting them on their Internet websites.

A District Court had ruled that "the defendants' Connecticut-based Internet activities constituted an act leading to an injury to the plaintiff in Virginia" because "the newspapers understood that their defamatory articles, which were available to Virginia residents on the Internet, would expose Young to public hatred, contempt, and ridicule in Virginia, where he lived and worked.... The defendants were all well aware of the fact that the plaintiff was employed as a warden within the Virginia correctional system and resided in Virginia," and "...any harm suffered by Young from the circulation of these articles on the Internet would primarily occur in Virginia."

However, the appeals court dismissed the suit, ruling that "newspapers do not have sufficient Internet contacts with Virginia to permit the district court to exercise specific jurisdiction over them."

Federal Prisons in Virginia

In the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, Congress decided to close the D.C. Correctional Facility at Lorton, and the land was transferred to Fairfax County in 2002. The only two Federal prisons remaining in Virginia are in Lee County (Jonesville) and Petersburg.

"State Pen" and "Death Row" in Virginia

Links

• Amnesty International - Abuses continue unabated? Cruel and inhumane treatment at Virginia supermaximum security prisons
• Fairfax County
• Lorton/Laurel Hill Property
• Transfer of the Former Lorton Prison Property
• GEO Group - Lawrenceville Correctional Center
• compare with Virginia Department of Corrections Lawrenceville Correctional Center
• Lorton Arts - History of the Lorton Workhouse
• US Department of Justice
• Bureau of Prisons - Maps of Facilities: Mid-Atlantic Region
• United States Penitentiary - Lee
• Petersburg Correctional Complex
• Census of State and Federal Correctional Facilities, 2000
• Virginia Department of Corrections
• Prison Facilities - Major Institutions and Correctional Units
• Washington Business Journal
• Prison closing frees community from image problem (February 14, 2003)
• Fairfax takes custody of Lorton prison (August 26, 2002)
• Washington Post - Lorton Plan Captive To Prison's History (October 27, 2005)

References