Gentrifying prisons in America

“I WOULD CONSIDER Lorton a hell-hole, being that life is always on the line,” Andre Mitchell, an inmate at a prison in Virginia, told a researcher in 1990. “At all times really. I never get to relax.” How restful he would find it today. The building in which he slept has been turned into serene apartments, their patios dotted with deckchairs. An outdoor pool, surrounded by plants, glints in the sun. Nearby, within the vast, windowless walls of what was a maximum security unit, a shopping centre is being built, the final stage in the development of a once overcrowded prison complex into “Liberty”, a spacious “urban village”.

The 80-acre development is a public-private partnership between Fairfax County and two development companies. They were drawn to the prison’s site, in the tech hub of northern Virginia, and to its design. Established in 1910 as a model jail, Lorton Reformatory resembled a campus, with walkways between dormitories and lots of outdoor space. Its inmates were taught vocational skills. But as more punitive ideas about incarceration returned and its population swelled during the “war on drugs”, the prison became violent. It closed in 2001.