Some 706 parole-eligible inmates are being been held longer in Virginia prisons, at $24,332 each per year, than recommended under the current no-parole sentencing guidelines. In a report to the General Assembly on Tuesday, the Virginia Criminal Sentencing Commission also found that as of the end of last year, there were 575 prison inmates eligible for geriatric release.

A little more than a year ago, state officials warned that so many people were being locked up in Virginia that it might take a new prison a year at a cost of $100 million each to keep pace. Instead, the number of people being sent behind bars has slowed to the point, for the moment at least, that the population of state prisons and local jails is dropping.

Indian Creek Correctional Center
St. Brides Correctional Center
Marion Correctional Treatment Center
Botetourt Correctional Center
Deep Meadow Correctional Center
Pocahontas Correctional Unit 13 (women)
Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women
Virginia Correctional Center for Women
 
Source: Virginia Department of Corrections

Virginia’s roughly 40 state prisons, correctional field units and work release centers aim to be smokeand tobacco-free by Feb. 1 for staff and inmates. Inmates were notified in January by a memo from Gene M. Johnson, director of the Virginia Department of Corrections. “Even when change is for the better, it can be difficult, and I appreciate your cooperation,“ wrote Johnson, who made the decision.

For more than a year, Virginia’s largest women’s prison rounded up inmates who had loose-fitting clothes, short hair or otherwise masculine looks, sending them to a unit that officers derisively dubbed the “butch wing,“ prisoners and guards say. Dozens were moved in an attempt to split up relationships and curb illegal sexual activity at the 1,200-inmate Fluvanna Correctional Center for Women, though some straight women were sent to the wing strictly because of their appearance, the inmates and corrections officers said.

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.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., is taking his push for prison reform on the road, visiting Richmond’s overcrowded jail and a South Richmond shelter for recovering addicts and alcoholics. “We have opened up the debate across the country,“ he said after a tour yesterday of The Healing Place, where he was met by a standing ovation from an Alcoholics Anonymous session for about 100 men.

A new study shows that the nation’s rate of prison population growth slowed by half—from 1.6 to 0.8 percent—in the first six months of last year compared with the same period in 2007. But in Virginia the growth in prison population dipped only slightly, from 3.1 percent to 3 percent, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

A former employee of the federal prison in Petersburg was sentenced to 20 months in prison yesterday for accepting a $1,500 bribe to smuggle marijuana to inmates. Edward J. Goode II, 39, of Midlothian, a case manager at the prison, had been charged in May with conspiracy, accepting and paying bribes, providing contraband to prisoners and possessing contraband in prison. He pleaded guilty in August to one felony count of bribery.

Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., wants Congress to find ways to cut the prison population—a sharply divisive issue that has shaped his home state’s politics for more than a decade. Backed by the White House and key Senate Republicans, Webb yesterday called for a national commission to conduct a 1½-year review of the criminal-justice system.

With the Obama administration’s plans to shut down the Camp Delta detention facility at Guantanamo Bay presumably moving forward apace, some detainees might end up in the commonwealth—perhaps in a detention facility in Northern Virginia to await trial there. Last week Virginia Reps. Eric Cantor, Frank Wolf, and Randy Forbes called on Gov. Tim Kaine to join them in opposing the idea of moving any detainees to any facility in Virginia.

One in every 46 adult Virginians is in prison or jail or on probation or parole—more than double the 1 in 108 under court sanction in 1982, a study says. The cost, according to The Pew Center on the States, now is $1.25 billion, or 7.6 percent of Virginia’s general-fund spending for the year that ended last June—and Virginia ranks just 41st among states in the number of adults under correctional control.

Four years old and in a new, $62 million maximum-security facility in rural Nottoway County, the Virginia Center for Behavioral Rehabilitation has been off to a rocky start. Surrounded by razor wire, the 28-acre campus is where rapists, child molesters and others deemed by courts to be “sexually violent predators” are held indefinitely for treatment after their prison terms end.

An apparently unsympathetic federal appeals court panel heard arguments yesterday over an angry letter written by a Virginia inmate to prison officials. In a 2004 letter, inmate Johnny Huff, 57, complained to the director of the Virginia Department of Corrections of “cold, callus, cruel, evil, uncaring, unmercyful, inhumane officials you have left in charge as wardens.“