By Lorraine Ahearn
News & Record
MCLEANSVILLE — In the interest of time, what’s not wrong with this picture of a North Carolina prison yard?
First, trickling fountains, a handcrafted windmill and a wishing well don’t belong. Nor do marigolds, banana plants, walking trails or okra plants. And these, put in and tended by inmates who say the guards are fair and the food is good?
True story. And somehow, Superintendent James Lacewell made it fit at Camp Burton, officially known as Piedmont Correctional Center, at least until 10:15 a.m. Wednesday.
That was when a part of the picture was definitely wrong: The barbed-wire gate swung open but didn’t swing shut. After a week of rushed prisoner transfers, a final inmate was freed, and the camp ceased to be a prison because of budget cuts.
“This is the first time this place has been empty since the 1930s,” said Randy Green of Gibsonville, who stayed behind on an inmate cleanup detail. “It’s eerie. No telling how many people have been through here.”
The legislature has ordered the Division of Prisons to close seven such small prisons across the state, reducing the payroll by 1,000 jobs between now and April as Raleigh’s deficit widens.
Though few dispute the economy of scale - consolidating the minimum-security prisons is expected to save North Carolina $22 million - Camp Burton’s closing carries a price.
As evidenced by the children’s playground and picnic area Lacewell ordered installed midway through his tenure, the approach was to consider the effects on the community of each inmate’s incarceration.
Transferring minimum-security inmates to points more distant from their home in Guilford County will mean more travel time for parents, spouses and children to visit.
Administrators say the closing also will uproot a network of 250 community volunteers that grew up around the prison, and longtime partnerships with employers.
In 2007, inmates from Camp Burton’s work-release program paid about $500,000 toward their families’ support, according to numbers reported to the N.C. Department of Correction, and contributed $170,000 to the state.
Lacewell’s 13-year tenure brought involvement by nearly 100 churches and civic groups, making McLeansville the envy of the state system.
At the now-empty barracks-style prison, which a guard compared with a “ghost town” Wednesday, inmates on a work detail cleaned out the dormitories and scrubbed the deserted dining hall.
Most inmates from the 160-bed prison were transferred to Forsyth, Davidson or Orange County, a boot-camp facility where Lacewell himself is being reassigned.
Nor will life be the same for the guards. Correctional Officer T. Steele will work a 12-hour shift in Salisbury’s high-rise Piedmont Correctional Institution, a far cry from Camp Burton’s pine grove, nightly church suppers and the inmate dog training program sponsored by the SPCA.
When state correction officials would visit, Lacewell recalled, the landscaping at the prison would raise eyebrows - and the first of many inevitable questions about the Guilford College graduate’s rehabilitation philosophy.
“What is it you’re going for here, James? Is this supposed to be a prison? Or a garden club?”
For guards, the proof was in the results.
“It was like a calming effect. They took pride in it,” Steele said, surveying an empty sitting area Lacewell had allowed prisoners to build from donated bricks. “I watched them do that by hand last summer. It was all manual.”
The key purpose of the minimum-security prison is to prepare inmates for a smooth return to society, on the theory that they will not return to prison. Lacewell recalled a longtime prisoner who had graduated from the penitentiary to a so-called “brown clothes” medium-security prison and finally closer to home in the minimum-security McLeansville.
Here, he earned the right to community passes and work release. Learning that he didn’t have to wear prison clothes when on leave, tears ran down his face.
“It’s the first time I’ve worn a pair of bluejeans in 26 years,” he told Lacewell.
For inmate Brian Bass, who has been incarcerated eight years, the drive through Greensboro while being transferred between prison facilities this week revealed a hometown he no longer knew: streets, condos he didn’t recognize.
“It was nice, but I didn’t even know where I was,” he said. “Most of these prisons, they institutionalize you, and then turn you loose to a world you know nothing about. This camp had the most involvement with the community. You weren’t just locked up.”
This morning, for the first time since 1939, there will be nobody locked up at Camp Burton. There will be a trickling fountain, a wishing well, a windmill, probably some okra left in the garden. And not a thing wrong with this picture.
Copyright 2009 News & Record (Greensboro, NC)