Lorton, From Prison to Parkland

The Progressive spirit breathed life into the first Lorton penal institution; the walls and watchtowers came later.

In 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt was faced with deplorable conditions in the District's jail and workhouse. He appointed a commission to investigate and suggest fixes. Its members recommended a dramatic change in the philosophy of how inmates should be treated and a way to make that happen. Congress bought a 1,155-acre tract north of the Occoquan River in southern Fairfax County, using condemnation proceedings to get all the land.

There were no cellblocks among the first structures. There were dormitories and an open-air design to provide inmates light, clean air and contact with nature.

The workhouse, or Occoquan Facility, was an agricultural work camp where inmates cultivated the land, produced bricks at the workhouse kilns and quarried stone for the area's roads. Over the years, other industries were tried, including making manhole covers, retreading tires and knitting sweaters. The idea was to create a self-sufficient community, so the complex also included a poultry farm, slaughterhouse, hog ranch, dairy, blacksmith shop and sawmill. There were field crops and fruit trees. Orchards grew, then shrank, along with other farming ventures.

But what was, until recently, the D.C. Correctional Facility at Lorton eventually made the name of the community synonymous with incarceration. Buildings that buttressed that image eventually dominated the landscape.

Protesters -- in this case suffragists who had picketed in the city -- were among the area's early detainees. They were kept at the women's division of the workhouse, a medium-security facility west of Ox Road, from June to December 1917. Those wooden buildings have since been destroyed.

A year before the women arrived, the Lorton Reformatory had opened as a facility for more serious offenders, closer to the workhouse; it was also a detention center without walls and offered industrial and trade instruction. Reformatory buildings were erected by the inmates, who used the brick they made at the kiln. The Colonial Revival style that was in vogue gave the construction its form, still evident in the brick complex built starting in the 1920s.

The superintendent's house was a 1790 estate known as Laurel Hill, which has given its name to the resurgent area. It was once the home of William Lindsay, a Revolutionary War patriot.

More-hardened criminals showed up in the 1930s, after a prison was built near the workhouse and the reformatory. Now, although buildings within the walls retained the Colonial Revival style, there were cellblocks, along with masonry walls, high fences and watchtowers. The prison offers today's most strikingly visible remnants of the penal complex.

The place grew in population and infamy. In 1995, the prison complex housed 7,300 inmates, about 44 percent over capacity.

One report called the prison a training ground for career criminals, citing a high number of repeat offenders. It said that, although escape and assault rates were at or below averages for similar prisons, problems included a ready availability of weapons and narcotics for inmates. In the 1970s and 1980s, the prison was beset by racial tension, drugs and lax administration. Politicians and citizens called for closing it down.

A 1987 General Accounting Office study found that nearly seven of every 10 adult inmates had previously been convicted of a felony in the District and had spent time at Lorton.

A report commissioned by Congress in 1996 underscored the persistence of major problems.

In the late 1990s, when overcrowding was severe, District prisoners were often shipped to federal prisons in other states, an echo of the practice followed before a walled, fortified prison was built. The dairy was closed and, the last vestiges of low-intensity rural detention were gone.

The year after the 1996 report to Congress, Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) introduced legislation to require the closing of the complex by 2004. But the Balanced Budget Act of 1997 required D.C. officials to begin transferring prisoners as soon as possible and to close Lorton earlier -- within four years.

The prison closed in 2001. The county had clamored for a return of its land, and in 2002 it got the title to the facilities. Since then, housing has increased, a new secondary school has gone up, and parks and a golf course have been established under an act of Congress that required development of a plan to "maximize the use of land for open space, parkland or recreation."