For Va. corrections, 1984 unrest led to tougher stances

The Great Escape on May 31, 1984, at Mecklenburg Correctional Center wasn't the only turmoil in Virginia's prison system that year.

In June, two maximum-security inmates on an outside work detail at the State Penitentiary in Richmond briefly escaped. On July 10, mini-riots at Mecklenburg injured six inmates and 10 guards.

And in early August, 32 maximum-security inmates at Mecklenburg held nine employees hostage. The takeover attempt was quelled the next morning as scores of correctional and law-enforcement officers gathered in a show of force.

Gov. Charles S. Robb stayed up all night monitoring the situation, ready to order guards to storm the prison in the morning if necessary. "Strike in the morning after your enemy has been up all night, sleepless," Robb recalled last week, harkening back to his days in Vietnam.

Investigative reports of the Briley brothers' escape from Mecklenburg detailed conditions at the prison -- "ungovernable conduct" among the "hostile, aggressive, highly dangerous inmate population" was "apparently the norm."

The direct blame went to faulty or inadequate management and supervision of the institution rather than faulty training, the reports said.

That was almost the precise opposite of what state corrections director Robert M. Landon said in the days after the escape.

"I don't even have to have the investigation in front of me to tell you that we had a breakdown in the training and the professionalism of the people who were on duty at those checkpoints," Landon said. "If any one of those security checkpoints had held fast, the Briley brothers wouldn't be out on the loose."

That was June 2, three days into the escape.

But Landon stayed on.

Then, in November that year, five inmates escaped from Nottoway Correctional Center, the state's newest, by cutting their way through a fence. Robb replaced Landon the next day.

Landon's successor, Allyn R. Sielaff, promised an overhaul of the system, tightening supervision, adding security and boosting pay for correctional officers.

At Mecklenburg, 10 guards were either fired or suspended in the months after the Brileys' escape. But the warden, Gary Bass, and his deputy, Harold Catron, stayed on. In July of that year, Catron and Bass, who later blamed the escape on court victories by inmate activists that eased controls over inmates, were transferred. They eventually ended up being promoted.

Prison turmoil, especially the escapes, propelled Virginia into a no-nonsense approach toward corrections. Tough stances on crime helped usher George Allen and Jim Gilmore into the state's highest office in the 1990s.

Catron, who had complained of lax administrative responses before the escape, became a key overseer of the reform effort in a newly created inspector general's office for corrections. Bass became chief of operations for the corrections department in July 1997.

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In 1995, Mecklenburg's mission changed to that of a reception and diagnostic center -- a temporary sorting house from which inmates are shipped to more appropriate facilities.

Parole for crimes committed on or after Jan. 1, 1995, was abolished under Allen. The average daily population of inmates in Virginia prisons tripled from about 9,500 in 1984 to about 31,000 today.

Starting pay for officers rose from $12,644 in 1984 to the current $28,738.

Since 1984, the state has built six high-security or maximum-security prisons dedicated to long-term prisoners: Nottoway Correctional Center (1984), Keen Mountain Correctional Center (1990), Sussex I State Prison (1998), Sussex II State Prison (1999) and the so-called "supermax" prisons Red Onion State Prison (1998) and Wallens Ridge State Prison (1999).

Wallens Ridge has since been downgraded and is no longer considered a supermax facility.

In August 1998, death row moved from Mecklenburg to the new $74.5 million maximum-security Sussex I in Southside. For all 14 current death-row inmates, Sussex is the only death row they have known.

Every cell is monitored; there is no mingling. Inmates average only seven hours a week out of their cells, each of which is 73 square feet.

Neither Red Onion nor Wallens Ridge, which cost about $70 million each, has had an escape.

The new prisons have become a fresh target for prison-reform advocates, who are voicing many of the same concerns that followed Gov. Mills E. Godwin's call for stepped-up security in 1977.

An inmate's statement on Red Onion has become a frequently bannered warning about life in the newest generation of Virginia's escape-proof prisons:

"The day I arrived I was . . . told that I was at Red Onion now and if I act up they would kill me and there was nothing anyone could or would do about it."

Contact Bill McKelway at (804) 649-6601 or .

Staff writer Reed Williams contributed to this report.