Lorton Arts Center's Drive-Thru 'Nightmare Prison' Faces Pushback

LORTON, VA — The Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton, located on the site of the former Lorton Correctional Complex, is planning a "Nightmare Prison" drive-thru entertainment event for the month of October that will include "frightening prisoners" and "creepy crowns." The organizers are billing the event as Northern Virginia's first-ever haunted drive-thru.

Criminal justice reform advocates are questioning the decision by the Workhouse Arts Center to use a former prison, notorious for its mistreatment of prisoners, as a drive-thru "Nightmare Prison" at a time when criminal justice is under the microscope in the wake of the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis and during a pandemic when prisoners across the country are contracting the coronavirus at higher rates due to their cramped living quarters.

Former prisons, many of them older facilities that were too expensive to keep open, have been turned into tourist attractions. The most famous former prison in the United States, Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, attracts about 1.5 million visitors a year. Former prisons in other states also have been turned into tourist attractions, while others have been repurposed as homeless shelters, special events venues and a distillery.

The Workhouse Arts Center opened its doors as a cultural arts center in 2008. It holds more than 300 performances, 800 classes and 100 exhibitions a year, although some of those have been canceled or moved online in 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Just before the coronavirus crisis struck, the Workhouse Arts Center opened a new museum, named the Lucy Burns Museum, which tells the story of the 91 years of the prison's history and the story of the suffragists who were imprisoned at the site in 1917, then known as the Occoquan Workhouse, for picketing the White House for women’s rights to vote.

In its description of the drive-thru haunted house, the Workhouse Arts Center says: "Zombies, swamp creatures, creepy clowns, scary dolls, and frightening prisoners are among 13 different scary scenes taking up residence on the Workhouse campus during the month of October. These new inhabitants will scare and entertain visitors experiencing the attraction from the safety of their cars."

Nazgol Ghandnoosh, senior research analyst at the Sentencing Project, a Washington, D.C.-based group that advocates for criminal justice reform, said the decision to hold the "Nightmare Prison" event at the former Lorton prison "seems really out of touch."

"This kind of program and this kind of event makes light of other people’s suffering at worst and at best it dehumanizes and seems aloof from the fact that we have about 2 million people incarcerated in the United States," Ghandnoosh told Patch.

When she read the description of the "Nightmare Prison" and how the Workhouse Arts Center was planning to recruit people as actors in the event, Ghandnoosh recalled an earlier time in U.S. history when Black people were lampooned. "I can’t help but think when the history gets written about this period, that these kinds of performances at prisons are going to belong to the broader category that we now see minstrel performances of the 19th century," she said.

For the past several years, the Workhouse Arts Center has held a Halloween-themed haunted attraction. "These events have been purely intended to provide entertainment to the public," Elena Romanova, chief development officer for the Workhouse Arts Foundation Inc., said in an email to Patch.

"As has been the case in the past, this year’s event will be hyper-fictionalized and is in no way intended to represent real life events or conditions that occurred at the former Lorton Correctional Facility or at any other prison," Romanova said.

The Workhouse Arts Center also "strives to accurately represent the history of the site, including prisoner conditions, through the Lucy Burns Museum," she said.

At the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, which closed as a prison in 1971 and reopened as a museum in 1994, its leaders have struggled with how to educate and entertain visitors in a way that is sensitive to the people, many of whom were people of color, who were imprisoned at the facility.

In 2014, the Eastern State Penitentiary, second only to Alcatraz in popularity among former prisons that have become museums, changed its main audio tour and its main tour experience by adding information about mass incarceration and the racial disparities in the nation's prison population. In 2016, the museum also began seeking out people who had been incarcerated to work on its education team.

Over the years, the Eastern State Penitentiary — where several movies including "Transformers" and "12 Monkeys" have been filmed — has held a Haunted House around Halloween that is a big moneymaker for the museum. The revenue from the Haunted House helps maintain the museum and pay for its exhibitions.

"We put a lot of work, especially in the last five years, to make the Haunted House as sensitive as possible to the experiences of people who have been incarcerated, some of whom were my co-workers," Sean Kelley, senior vice president of the Eastern State Penitentiary museum, told Patch.

The popular Halloween haunted house at Eastern State Penitentiary, known as "Terror Behind the Walls," has been suspended for 2020 due to the coronavirus.

"We've held the Haunted House for many years and made a lot of money that we needed badly to stabilize the building and build our exhibits," Kelley said. "But it is definitely a compromise and it has to be taken seriously when you make a choice like that because the potential of making a joke out of the trauma of others is a responsibility that you have to go into with your eyes wide open."

Even without the coronavirus, Kelley said the former prison may have put on hold its annual haunted house.

“After the murder of George Floyd, we really felt that any kind of costumed entertainment didn’t feel like a good choice for us in 2020, inside a building that once held people against their will," he said.

Ghandnoosh of the Sentencing Project served as an adviser for a 2016 exhibit at the Eastern State Penitentiary called "Prisons Today: Questions in the Age of Mass Incarceration" that won first place in the Excellence in Exhibitions awards category from the American Alliance of Museums for being a historical site that seriously deals with social issues.

While a large portion of its fundraising comes from the Haunted House, the Eastern State Penitentiary has "recognized that there is a tension between their mission and the Haunted House," Ghandnoosh said.

For the Workhouse Arts Center in Lorton to "begin taking this step is not the right direction to be going," she said about their plans for the drive-thru "Nightmare Prison" event in October.

"I would encourage more reflection about not just the history but the living travesty of mass incarceration that we’re trying to address and for them to consider their role in this issue," she said.

This article originally appeared on the Lorton Patch