Today, a resident on the ground floor of Liberty Crest Apartments in Lorton, Virginia, might be taking a call in their private backyard, a fenced off, grassy area connected to others in the complex. This person might pass through the buildings’ brick archways before going to work, or even turn onto Reformatory Way to see a neighbor on a Sunday afternoon. And while their day-to-day life may read as standard, the markers of their routines—the yards, the bricks that make up their building’s exterior, the street names—hold a much darker history.
Twenty-three years ago, Liberty Crest Apartments was one of eight prisons that made up Lorton Correctional Complex. The other seven have either been torn down or are some combination of an art gallery, a museum, and a supermarket. Conceptualized by Washington, D.C., architect Snowden Ashford, part of Lorton’s initial layout reflected the then “progressive” ideology of reform, which meant specific design choices like open dormitories rather than cell blocks. Some of those dormitories now house D.C. commuters, their greenery previously occupied by incarcerated men playing basketball or handball on what was the prison rec yard, the bricks of their archways handmade by some of the first men confined to this complex in the early 1900s.
“It’s definitely weird for us who actually served time here to see people paint and live in it,” says Karim Mowatt, a filmmaker and writer who was one of the last people to leave Lorton before it closed in 2001. “But if you look at America’s history, everywhere is littered with blood to a certain extent.”
You can find traces of carceral facilities in repurposed sites all over the United States, from a regenerative farm in North Carolina to hotels and Airbnbs in Texas, Massachusetts, and New York. And while some of these prison flipping projects acknowledge their past as a contributor to the mass incarceration that defines America, others use puns and photo opps with mugshots to make light—and money—off of the criminal legal system. For $195 a night, an Airbnb listing in Ephraim, Utah, boasts an offer to “Spend the night in JAIL!” with “stunning limestone…cells,” while another in Hampton, Iowa, assuages prospective guests that “the doors will not be locked behind you.” Similarly, The Inn at Warm Springs, Liberty Hotel, and The Cell Block have opened what were formerly cell doors with sensationalized headlines to entice guests. While these hotel websites give a brief overview of their past, their insensitive/offensive puns (“break the chains of monotony”) and casual nods to confinement (“graffiti left by some long forgotten convict”) signify a gross lack of understanding when it comes to the gravity of mass incarceration.
It’s hard to find a system—which confines 1.9 million people across 1,566 state prisons, 98 federal prisons, 3,116 local jails, 1,323 juvenile correctional facilities, 142 immigration detention facilities, and 80 Indian country jails—funny. And yet, in the same way many Americans dismiss the history of enslavement, we have managed to belittle a criminal legal system and therefore dehumanize the countless communities impacted by it through these versions of prison flipping. Like the majority-white college parties or alumni reunions and corporate events held on plantations, “these [institutions] are trying to colonize the optics of suffering to make it trivial,” says artist Jared Owens, whose work often responds to his experience with incarceration. “It’s just as bad as Black face.”
