Mecklenburg Correctional Center was a maximum security prison operated by the Virginia Department of Corrections in unincorporated Mecklenburg County, Virginia, United States, near Boydton. It was closed in 2012 due to a decrease in the number of inmates in the Virginia corrections system and expensive ongoing maintenance needs. The facility served as a reception and classification facility.
Mecklenburg formerly housed the Commonwealth of Virginia's male death row. It is located at (36.6607, -78.3636).
History
It first opened in 1976. Opened at a cost of $20 million, 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.
On August 3, 1998, the male death row moved to its final location, the Sussex I State Prison, from the Mecklenburg Correctional Center. Capital punishment in Virginia was abolished in 2021.
The 1984 escape from death row
Six inmates facing the Virginia electric chair made an escape from the facility on May 31, 1984. The inmates who escaped included two of the Briley Brothers (Linwood and James), along with Lem Tuggle, Earl Clanton, Derick Peterson, and Willie Jones. They had observed how correctional officers were complacent and often failed to follow security procedures. While returning to the building from evening recreation time around 8:00 pm, Clanton hid in the bathroom next to the entrance of the death row cell block, then charged out on cue from another inmate when the adjacent control room's door was left open.
Clanton overpowered the officer inside and released all of the locks in the cell block. Inmates took over the block with homemade knives and blindfolded and bound responding officers, changing into their uniforms. Death row inmates Wilbert Lee Evans and Willie Lloyd Turner had participated in planning meetings for the escape months prior, but they ultimately did not participate; guards later stated that Evans and Turner also prevented the escaping inmates from harming any prison workers, and at least one stated he "[owed] his life" to Evans and Turner. Evans's attorneys in particular argued that his role in protecting guards in the escape should have earned him mercy from execution. Evans was ultimately executed in the electric chair in 1990, and Turner was executed by lethal injection in 1995.
The escaping inmates bluffed their way out of the prison by calling the front gate of the prison and pretending to be officers who needed a van supplied and both gates opened to aid in the disposal of a bomb supposedly constructed by the inmates. The bomb was actually a portable TV covered with a blanket. The group correctly deduced that the prison had no set protocol for bomb disposal and so the gate officer could be fooled into opening both gates at the same time, in violation of standard procedure.
The six escapees put on riot helmets to conceal their faces and carried the TV out of the unit on a stretcher while spraying it with a fire extinguisher. They put it into the waiting van, which they drove straight out of the prison at 10:47 pm. Once the six men were free, they crossed into nearby North Carolina. Unable to agree on their next move, they soon split up in the town of Warrenton and abandoned the van in a schoolyard.
Clanton and Peterson were caught the following afternoon, on June 1, in Warrenton. A patrol car driving past a laundromat spotted the two men inside, one of them wearing what appeared to be a correctional officers' jacket with the badges torn off. They had stopped to eat cheese and drink wine from a convenience store.
Tuggle, Jones and the Briley brothers stole a pickup truck with the vanity tag 'PEI-1' from the driveway of its owner. The Brileys were dropped off in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where a local uncle got them a job at a North Philadelphia car garage under assumed names. Tuggle and Jones planned to continue north into Canada, as they knew that Canadian authorities would not extradite fugitives facing execution. They got as far north as Vermont, where Tuggle was apprehended in Stamford on June 8 after robbing a souvenir shop for $80.