By Hawes Spencer
The Daily Progress, Charlottesville, Va.
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — It’s not every day that rural Buckingham County finds itself at the center of a major prison experiment, but come Sept. 1, its two state prisons, the Buckingham Correctional Center and Dillwyn Correctional Center, will join one in Southside in a new program that makes the prisons open by invitation only and gives prisoners greater freedoms and comforts.
The hope behind the “Virginia Model” is that everyone inside — inmates and guards — will benefit.
Former McIntire School of Commerce Foundation administrator Yvonne Elizabeth Hillman is expected to plead guilty to embezzling $20,000 from the organization.
“We’ve all got family and friends that work in the prisons,” Buckingham County Administrator Karl Carter told The Daily Progress, “so anything that helps keep the people that work inside the prisons safe, we’re all for that.”
The Virginia Model pilot program was unveiled one year ago at Lawrenceville Correctional Center, which operated as a privately managed facility since its 1998 opening. Lawrenceville saw dramatic changes after the Virginia Department of Corrections took over.
Buckingham Correctional Center is a Virginia state prison on 968 acres outside the town of Dillwyn in Buckingham County.
According to department figures, the number of positive drug tests fell by 94% and cellphone seizures dropped by 75%. Additionally, drug overdoses and overdose deaths were eliminated — as were were serious assaults on inmates.
“We haven’t had a single fight in a year,” Lawrenceville Warden Mike Seville says in a YouTube video shared by the Department of Corrections.
The department credits such improvements to Lawrenceville’s conversion to an “incentive facility,” one where admission and continued presence are tied to an absence of serious infractions. If the Virginia Model appears to be taking a page from the concept of charter schools, civil rights lawyer John Whitehead, who runs a Charlottesville-based -based nonprofit group focused on civil liberties called the Rutherford Institute, has some concerns.
“While the stated goals of the Virginia Model — reducing violence, encouraging accountability, and improving safety — are commendable,” Whitehead told The Daily Progress in an email, “its implementation raises critical civil liberties concerns.”
At issue is what happens to the folks who aren’t invited.
“If those who do not qualify for transfer to ‘model’ facilities are left behind in deteriorating or punitive conditions,” warned Whitehead, “the state risks turning basic rights into conditional privileges.”
Such concerns are not lost on Carter.
“My question was what happens to the current inmates in Buckingham and Dillwyn correctional facilities,” Carter said. “Are they being shipped out or are they being merged with the new ones coming in?”
Department of Corrections spokeswoman Carla Miles told The Daily Progress via email that such inmates who don’t make it into the four incentive facilities, which will also include Cluster S1 at Greensville Correctional Center, will be “properly housed at an appropriate security facility.”
In their latest YouTube video, department officials reveal how quickly that can happen.
“If you get an infraction, you’re gone the next day,” Chad Dotson, the director of the Department of Corrections, says in the video.
In that same video, Seville stresses that the expulsion policy is based on the idea of community. Seville recalls how the experiment began in 2024.
“We started Aug. 1; I sent the first person away on Aug. 2,” says Seville. “But truly the rest of the community appreciated that.”
If a quick exit to another facility is the metaphorical stick in the Virginia Model, there are several carrots.
The department touts extended visitation and programming as well as upgraded mattresses and more expansive food choices. State data show that 68% of inmates now at Lawrenceville came from a higher-security facility.
“You have to have a learning atmosphere in [order] to learn, and that’s what this model creates,” an unidentified Lawrenceville inmate says in another department video.
“It’s mind-blowing” says another inmate, “the things they’re allowing to take place here.”
The things include dropping the fences that previously separated jail yards and expanding educational and vocational programs, including inmate-led workshops and peer groups. The inmates also are allowed to keep art supplies and board games.
According to a department fact sheet, Lawrenceville plans to add podcasting, hydroponic gardens and raised vegetable beds, as well as a snack bar in the recreation yard.
Former Lawrenceville inmate Quadaire Patterson said the changes appear to have already improved conditions.
“Lawrenceville had a great lack of supervision,” Patterson told The Daily Progress. “It had a great lack of resources.”
Patterson said he knew people who died when a fentanyl epidemic gripped Lawrenceville and that the corporate operator then running the facility couldn’t handle the crisis.
“I think the Virginia Model is an answer to the lack of supervision that the prisoners have had for over a decade,” said Patterson.
Patterson spent 16 years behind bars for robbing a drug dealer when he was 19. Now a family man running a nonprofit group called Brilliance Behind Bars, which fosters inmate creativity, he’s preparing to return to Lawrenceville — this time as a guest judge in a prison debate tournament.
“From the guys I talked to, the most fascinating thing to them is how susceptible the compound is to peer-led programming,” he said.
Inmates running workshops for other inmates is a shift that Patterson said could have come only come after the state booted the GEO Group, the final for-profit firm that ran the facility.
“Private corporations seek to profit, and sometimes they restrict necessary resources in order to profit,” Patterson said.
The Virginia Model, he said, offers those still inside something typically elusive behind bars.
“What’s most important about the Virginia Model is it represents hope,” said Patterson. “For the 16 years that I did previous to my release last year, the sense of hope was at a minimum.”
However, Patterson wishes that the whole system could be elevated, not just for those who make the cut. Because in his view, most returning citizens want to do right.
“They are actually more excited to contribute to society than not,” said Patterson. “We’re just regular people too.”
Critics such as Whitehead point out that the Virginia Model, which the department claims refers to its entire system, is only as good as its baseline and that if the conditions in other prisons remain harsh, then the whole system puts basic human dignity at risk. Whitehead invokes “Animal Farm,” one of George Orwell’s dystopian novels in which farm animals who decline supposedly optional labor see their rations curtailed.
“Voluntary labor was only ‘voluntary’ in name,” said Whitehead. “Refusal came with punishment.”
While The Daily Progress’ request to speak with Dotson was not fulfilled, Dotson said upon his September 2023 hiring that he assumed the helm of a system that already had one particularly notable attribute in its favor.
“I,” said Dotson, “am laser-focused on providing the highest quality reentry services for inmates and probationers in order to continue the effort of reducing Virginia’s 20.6% recidivism rate, which is currently the second lowest in the United States.”
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