Are Virginia's Prisons Really In Crisis?

The event is free and open to the public

“No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones.” - South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, imprisoned for 27 years 

Author Dale Brumfield, in his 2017 book, Virginia State Penitentiary, A Notorious History, details the 190-year saga of Virginia’s infamous first prison, known for leasing African American and other prisoners as slave laborers, having unheated cells and terrible food, and for housing children with adults.

With the establishment of the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) in 1974 came significant improvements in what was Thomas Jefferson’s original experiment, a model that shaped the future of the American prison system everywhere.

Former Virginia Attorney General Mark Earley, a Republican, has proposed that public servants involved with the criminal justice system should spend at least 24 hours behind bars to give them a better feel of what prison life is really like. He believes this would help them assess the degree to which the VDOC actually corrects those it incarcerates, encourage them to consider alternative consequences for those who are not a danger to society, and better determine how those who demonstrate changed behavior should be given a second chance to rejoin the labor force and become productive and tax-paying citizens.

Paulettra James, whose husband is serving a long prison sentence, recently had a column published in the Richmond Times in which she likewise urged lawmakers to visit prisons to assess the effects they have on those incarcerated and to better understand how hard prison can be on families. “They should experience what it’s like for families like mine to drive hundreds of miles and pay huge gas bills so we can keep marriages alive and family ties strong. Those family connections have been proven to reduce recidivism and give our loved ones a better chance at success after prison.”

Virginia’s Department of Corrections, with a $1.5 billion annual budget and with over 30,000 men and women in its custody, is seen by many as subject to the least public oversight of any government agency in the Commonwealth. Any such lack of transparency, coupled with the challenge of chronic staff shortages and restricted budgets, can result in conditions that not only fail to rehabilitate and correct, but can be destructive and dangerous.

In its own defense, the VDOC, in a February 16, 2022 press release, stated that “Virginia’s legislature is more than capable of providing oversight when and where it sees a need. VADOC also receives direct supervision from the Governor and Virginia’s Secretary of Public Safety and Homeland Security.”

For many, however, hard questions remain. On June 9 the ACLU of Virginia launched a first showing of its new documentary, “Injustice: Hidden Crisis in Virginia’s Prisons,” and at 7 pm Monday, September 26 there will be a screening of the film at the Court Square Theater in downtown Harrisonburg.

This special event, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by JMU’s Gandhi Center for Global Non-Violence and EMU’s Zehr Institute, with the endorsement of local groups like the Valley Justice Coalition and Virginia Organizing. A panel discussion and Q & A will follow.

The purpose of the screening is not to simply focus on problems within our correctional system, but to provide direction for radically improving a system that could become a model for communities and jurisdictions everywhere.

As concerned citizens, we need to affirm wherever the VDOC is doing well while urging it to do even better in fulfilling its stated mission: “We are in the business of helping people to be better by safely providing effective incarceration, supervision and evidence-based re-entry services to inmates and supervisees.”