“When you hear about Lorton, it’s always negative,” says Mowatt, a former prison inmate who is now an independent filmmaker in DC. “I wanted to document the place we knew, the good and the bad.” Mowatt, 51, wrote, directed, narrated and scored the film; he also used $20,000 of his own money to fund it. There were 10 sold-out screenings in DC, and in September it premiered at the Prince George Film Festival. The documentary is streaming on Vimeo and Prime Video.
Among those interviewed in the film is Raymond “Shorty” Coates, 63, who pointed Mowatt to the latest copy of the VHS tape, which was from the playwright. Coates served 24 years for armed robbery, mostly at Lorton. When he arrived as a teenager in the late 1970s, he was sent to Youth Center I, one of eight facilities that housed prisoners in a compound that spanned 3,500 acres 20 miles southwest of DC Known as “Gladiator School” for its extreme violence. , the Youth Center welcome for Coates was hot grease thrown in his face as he was on the kitchen detail. Over the years, he always looked forward to the play, broadcast on closed-circuit television for inmates every Christmas. It was called “Holidays…Hollow Days”.
“I wanted to help Karim tell his story,” Coates told me. “Here’s a younger brother who’s from where I’m from, and he’s bold enough to try his hand. It is our spirit that is renewed in these times, for a new generation.
The film depicts Lorton’s strange journey from a utopian prison farm to a reviled penal colony. Located on a hilly site in Virginia near the Occoquan River, Lorton was first developed in the early 1900s as a Progressive Era experiment. The vision was to provide rehabilitation through farm labor and lax countryside security for inmates of the overcrowded DC prison. The campus-style open-air setting included low-rise brick dormitories, walkways, and courtyards.
By the 1960s, however, the Lorton compound had become overcrowded, understaffed and underfunded: a holding pen for a steadily growing prison population of 10,000. The film details the staggering statistics: from 1960 to 1996, there were 1,000 escapes, 25 riots, over 5,000 assaults, and over 50 inmates and several guards killed. It became the bane of politicians and locals alike, and in 1997 a federal mandate began the process of closure.
The relative freedom of movement enjoyed by inmates at Lorton left many vulnerable to altercations. Mowatt obtained security camera footage depicting the horrific aftermath of multiple stab wounds. Some of the crafted weapons included lawnmower blades ground into swords.
Mowatt unearthed newspaper clippings from local libraries, and they appear on screen to help drive the narrative forward: “Inmates Run Jail, Officials Admit” (1972), “Lorton Called Unfit for Humans” ( 1974), “Lorton ‘Prison of Terror'” (1974). The film also includes television news footage from a 1986 riot, which burned down a medium to high security section of the prison that averaged 200 stabbings and five murders a year.
As a counterpoint to the chaos, Lorton had another distinction: it boasted an abundance of rehabilitation programs. Most were designed and executed by the inmates, many of whom came from DC’s poorest and most disadvantaged neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River and were often scapegoats for draconian drug policies that meted out harsher on minorities. Along with Inner Voices, the theater group that performed “Holidays…Hollow Days,” the list included singing groups like the Amazing Gospel Souls; traveling sports teams; GED and law courses; welding and carpentry; tailoring and tailoring workshops; and concerts by Frank Sinatra, Fugazi and ex-con Chuck Brown.
These often overlooked programs were run by Lorton’s “thinking guys,” as Coates calls them. By highlighting their work, the film goes beyond the stereotypical portrayal of prison violence and offers stories of redemption.
To make his film, Mowatt had to break and break back into prison where he served time for drug trafficking at various times starting in 1989, when he was 17, eventually spending more than two decades behind bars. He was surprised but delighted to find that the site had not been bulldozed; instead, many century-old brick buildings had been redeveloped into luxury condos and an arts center.
In 2020, Mowatt and his team scaled a fence in Lorton after the construction workers left for the day. Mowatt conducted interviews with former inmates in their former cells; he also filmed from his own.
For a photoshoot for this article in October, Mowatt and Coates visited the development – which is called, somewhat ironically, Liberty Crest and features views of old watchtowers and a street named Reformatory Way. It was the first time Coates had returned since Lorton closed. He was delighted to see the pull-up bars where he used to start his mornings, and he also noticed the aisles, cleansed of old bloodstains, where he had fought with other inmates.
“It’s amazing to me that they took this dark, dusty, dangerous place and made it almost a work of art,” Coates told me later. Mowatt also says he is impressed with the “creative” repurposing of the prison complex. He says razing the site would have further erased Lorton from the historical record, and he hopes his documentary will prevent the prison’s history from being forgotten.
He says he’s already seen the film’s effect as a balm during post-screening Q&A sessions. Families and friends – many of whom are mothers, wives, sisters and girlfriends of former Lorton inmates – tell him the film has been a blessing. “They say they had no idea what these guys were really going through in prison,” he says. “After seeing the film, they understand. They’re like, ‘Oh, that’s why you came home a different person.’ It gave a lot of people closure.
Eddie Dean is a writer from Maryland.
