History
Opened in March 1977 at a cost of $20 million dollars, this 360 inmate facility was intended to serve as the facility for the "worst of the worst" among inmates in the Virginia Department of Corrections system – a maximum security prison. At the opening ceremony, Governor Mills E. Godwin Jr. stated that the facility served as a "monument to failure", as the inmates to be housed there were viewed as the most incorrigible and likely unable to be returned to free society.
The first warden at Mecklenburg was Gene Johnson. Johnson's assistant warden for operations and security was Fred L. Finkbeiner, who had served as the warden of the well-known Joliet and Pontiac maximum-security prisons in Illinois.
The prison has features, such as numerous electronic cellhouse doors that required the continuous presence of a corrections officer (CO) around the clock. This put fewer than necessary officers on the floor to observe inmates. Additionally, the low pay led to numerous CO positions remaining unfilled and caused some COs to be susceptible to bribes from inmates to bring contraband into the facility. There were a high number of CO-on-inmate as well as inmate-on-CO assaults, leading to numerous lawsuits alleging human rights abuses against the corrections department.
On August 3, 1998, the male death row moved to its current location, the Sussex I State Prison, from the Mecklenburg Correctional Center.
Read more about this topic: Mecklenburg Correctional Center
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Three million of such stones would be needed before the work was done. Three million stones of an average weight of 5,000 pounds, every stone cut precisely to fit into its destined place in the great pyramid. From the quarries they pulled the stones across the desert to the banks of the Nile. Never in the history of the world had so great a task been performed. Their faith gave them strength, and their joy gave them song.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“What is most interesting and valuable in it, however, is not the materials for the history of Pontiac, or Braddock, or the Northwest, which it furnishes; not the annals of the country, but the natural facts, or perennials, which are ever without date. When out of history the truth shall be extracted, it will have shed its dates like withered leaves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)