The ailing economy appears to be fueling an increased interest in public-safety jobs in the Richmond area, including among people who were laid off from positions in other fields.

A correctional officer faces charges of delivering marijuana to inmates at the Augusta County Correctional Center.

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.

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.

The FBI says a man who escaped from a Virginia prison in 1982 has been arrested in Georgia. Richard Boucher, 56, was taken into custody Wednesday on a fugitive warrant in Murray County, along the Tennessee line, where he had lived for most of the past 27 years, said Gregory Jones, special agent in charge of the FBI in Atlanta. Boucher, who used the alias Eric Coleman in Georgia, was serving a 10-year robbery sentence at the Virginia Department of Corrections prison in Chesapeake when he escaped, Jones said.

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.“