How Old Prisons Are Being Converted Into Stylish Apartments

Diamond Pearson needed a new place to live and was looking for something with an industrial feel. When Liberty Crest Apartments in Fairfax County, Va., came up in her online search, she was intrigued.

“I checked it out and fell in love — the brick, the concrete floors — it was so beautiful,” said Ms. Pearson, 32, who works at Fairfax County Schools. Every unit in the complex is unique, and she liked that, too. It wasn’t until she was signing the lease agreement that someone said, “Did you know this is an old prison?”

Indeed, the development, now called Liberty, had a former life as the Lorton Reformatory, a prison housing inmates from Washington, D.C. Built in 1910, it’s best known for the dozens of suffragists who were imprisoned there in harsh and violent conditions — including forced feedings — after they picketed outside the White House.

The prison shut down in 2001, and the next year Fairfax County bought the 2,400-acre site, which had included a farm and work areas where prisoners could learn trades like metalworking and carpentry, for $4.2 million. The county gradually turned the property into a park and golf course, three schools and a sprawling arts center. In 2008, the county started working with the Alexander Company, a Wisconsin developer with expertise in historic preservation and adaptive reuse, to convert former cellblocks and other buildings, and to build new structures. The complex now includes 165 apartments, of which 98 percent are leased, 157 town homes and 24 single-family homes, as well as commercial spaces. In 2017, tenants started moving in, many attracted by amenities like a swimming pool, 24-hour gym and yoga room.

The first night in her new place was the hardest, said Ms. Pearson, who, together with her son, Britain, and dog, Nike, has been in her apartment since 2022. “It was a little spooky — I thought, ‘Wow, this was actually a prison,’ but I adjusted,” she said. “I love it. The architecture here, every bit of it tells a story — every inch, every crack.”

The entities in charge of the redevelopment — Fairfax County, the Alexander Company and Elm Street Development — worked closely with community members during the planning process. Local residents pushed for mixed-income housing, and the developers ensured that roughly a quarter of the units were affordable to people making 50 percent of the area’s median income. Market-rate, two-bedroom apartments are $1,600 to $2,500, which is roughly average in the area.

Community members also wanted to maintain the site’s character. Built during the Progressive-era with a focus on rehabilitation, the prison’s Colonial Revival buildings used bricks the prisoners made themselves on site while sleeping in tents until the structures were complete. Maintaining that character was also something the developers themselves had prioritized, in part to take advantage of tax credits granted to historic sites.

The redeveloped site includes some of the prison’s original signage, as well as a museum documenting the property’s past. Named for the noted suffragist Lucy Burns, who was incarcerated at Lorton, the museum showcases farming techniques used by the early prisoners, as well as homemade weapons.

“I think they’ve done a pretty good job of keeping the historicity and the integrity of the original design and intent,” said Lynne Garvey-Hodge, a Fairfax resident who was chair of Fairfax’s history commission when the county bought the property. “I’m very pleased with it.”

The Lorton Reformatory’s redevelopment has become an example for cities across the country as increasing numbers of states elect to close some of their prisons.

In the last decades of the 20th century, the United States experienced a prison-building boom; more than 1,000 facilities were constructed from 1970 to 2000. Around 2010, however, the number of incarcerated people began to decline, partly because of sentencing reforms and the decriminalization of some drug-related offenses. Almost 200 state and federal correctional facilities closed from 2000 to 2022.

In New York State alone, the inmate population has dropped more than 50 percent since 1999. In November, two correctional facilities in New York, in Sullivan and Washington Counties, closed. Those institutions join 24 other prisons in the state that have ceased operations over the past 13 years. Of those, some are being reused in ways that will benefit their communities, but many are still vacant.

The success stories include Warwick, N.Y., near the New Jersey border, where the municipal government led the effort to turn the Mid-Orange Correctional Facility into a business campus and sports park. In Manhattan, the former Lincoln Correctional Facility is set to be an affordable housing complex called Seneca. And in Fishkill, in the Hudson Valley, Conifer Realty recently bought the Downstate Correctional Facility site, a 100-acre property that closed in 2022. The company plans to turn the complex into a mixed-use development with housing.

But Liberty and the complexes in New York are all in somewhat populous parts of the country. Many detention centers in rural regions, where most U.S. prisons were built over the past half-century, have no takers. Those facilities were oftentimes courted by local government officials hoping a prison would bring jobs to the area. But when those detention centers, sometimes miles from any vibrant economic activity, are abandoned, companies don’t often line up to open their businesses there.

“There’s a lack of awareness that there can be a future for a closed prison beyond incarceration, a lack of imagination about what a closed prison site can be transformed into,” said Nicole Porter, senior director of advocacy for the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit organization that promotes fairness in the criminal justice system.

Ms. Porter’s group, which pushes to minimize imprisonment, supports repurposing the facilities so that they can never again be used as prisons.

Older prisons are often located closer to urban centers, making them ostensibly better candidates for redevelopment. But in some cities, including Dallas, Indianapolis, Nashville and Pittsburgh, sprawling complexes sit empty because redeveloping a prison can be costly, Ms. Porter said.

The walls of prisons are thick, making them expensive to renovate. Or, as in the case of the Tennessee State Prison in Nashville — a castle-like structure built in 1898 by the architect Samuel Patton — the building might be full of asbestos.

And redeveloping these sites — whether as privately owned mixed-use or residential projects, or public-private endeavors aimed at stimulating the local economy — requires resources and the engagement of many parties, including local residents.

Community involvement may mean some plans never get off the ground, as is the case in Thomaston, Maine, where the 15-acre plot the Maine State Prison used to be on is still sitting empty two decades after the prison closed because residents have failed to agree on options for the property.

Despite the hurdles, officials know that redeveloped former prison sites could be catalysts for communities. In New York, Gov. Kathy Hochul created a Prison Redevelopment Commission in 2022 to push shuttered sites toward reuse.

In Utah, the 600-acre site of a closed prison is being redeveloped by Lincoln Property Company of Dallas, and local firms along with state government. Utah State Prison was built 70 years ago in what was then a rural area, 20 miles south of Salt Lake City. The region grew around it, and today the property lies in the state’s most populous area.

Almost a decade ago, an economic study highlighted the prison’s strategic value, so the state built a new prison west of the city, and formed a land authority to guide the older property’s revamp.

Much of the site has been razed. The plan is to turn it into a huge, dense development called the Point, which will take at least 15 years to complete. The state will own the land and is guiding the process of building thousands of housing units and a rail station and bike trails to connect it to the rest of the area.

The property is near universities and Utah’s fast-growing tech sector; the development will also house an innovation district, which aims to bring research institutions and companies together in proximity. The Utah governor, Spencer Cox, and legislative leaders broke ground on the project in December.

As the Utah prison gets underway, leaders in Michigan City, Ind., are watching. They, too, have a state prison scheduled to close in a few years that occupies a key piece of land. Next to the Indiana Dunes National Park and roughly a mile from Lake Michigan, its redevelopment could unlock a new future for the town, which for years experienced declining population numbers but has recently begun to grow.

But first, the town will need to get control of the property from the state — something that can be difficult. And then there’s the question of the prison’s history. “They do executions on site; they have for a good long time,” said Doug Farr, an architect who’s helping Michigan City with its plan. “Somewhere in this complex, there’s a chair or something like that.”

Figuring out how to honor a site where executions took place will be difficult, Mr. Farr said. But it will be years before the development is finished, and “we’re counting on a time lag,” he said. “Maybe people will disassociate from their memories by then.”