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.

On a balmy day in April 1977, Gov. Mills E. Godwin and a bevy of prison officials, some dressed in seersucker suits, performed a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a cluster of grand new buildings. The cost of the state’s newest maximum-security prison would run to $19.6 million. The set of five matched units, each housing 72 inmates, promised to become a bulwark of economic opportunity across hundreds of square miles of job-poor Southside Virginia.