Two more inmates who walked away from a minimum security satellite camp at the Federal Correctional Complex Petersburg surrendered early Tuesday to the staff of the facility where they were housed. Only one of four inmates who escaped Friday is still at large.
Corey Branch, 41, and Kareem Shaw, 46, turned themselves in without incident just after midnight Tuesday, said Kevin Connolly, a supervisor with the U.S. Marshals Service Capital Area Regional Fugitive Task Force, which is assisting in the search and capture of the inmates. Tavares Graham, 44, surrendered early Sunday morning.
That leaves Lamonte Rashawn Willis, 30, of Suffolk, who Connolly said remains on the run. A reward of up to $2,000 is available to anyone with information that leads to his arrest.
The satellite camp, which houses low-security risk inmates in a dormitory, is adjacent to the Federal Bureau of Prisons minimum-security facility at 1100 River Road in Prince George County.
The four inmates were discovered missing from the satellite camp around 1:45 a.m. Friday. Authorities believe they walked away around 9:30 or 10 p.m. Friday.
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"They are all serving a federal sentence; they are just allowed to serve their sentences in this sort-of work release camp," Connolly said. "They are out in the community during the day. So they are trusted to work in the community and because of their [backgrounds], the Bureau of Prisons will take a chance on them and give them jobs to work for the state or the government."
"This is not something where they weren't already in the community," Connolly added. "There could have been a myriad of friends that have visited them ... so they had contact with the outside world. It wasn't like they were confined to that facility."
But at the end of the day, the inmates are required to report back to prison camp. "They were not supposed to be gone [Friday] evening at all," Connolly said. They apparently left after a 9:30 head count at the camp.
All four men face new federal charges of escaping from a federal prison, which carries a punishment of up to five years in prison.
Branch, Graham and Shaw were serving federal prison sentences ranging from 10 to 16 years for major drug offenses involving fentanyl, cocaine or heroin. Branch and Graham were also convicted of possessing firearms after being convicted of a felony or in furtherance of drug trafficking. Willis was serving 18 years for possessing and concealing a stolen firearm and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon.
One of four escaped inmates who walked away from a federal prison satellite camp in Hopewell has turned himself in, authorities said Monday.
Incarceration demographics in Virginia
Incarceration demographics in Virginia
The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Not only that, America also puts more people in prison per capita than in any other independent democracy. Even progressive states with low incarceration rates relative to the rest of the United States have more people in jail than most other places in the developed world. If individual states were counted as countries, many of them would have the highest incarceration rates in the world, ahead of actual entire other countries.
The reasons behind the mass incarceration epidemic in the United States are multifaceted and complex. They are not due to rates of violent crime, which are actually less prevalent in the United States than they are in many countries that rank higher on the incarceration scale, including Russia and Turkey, which both have authoritarian governments. Instead, the high rates of American incarceration boil down to a reliance on policing and jails to address a range of social problems that could be solved with other more rehabilitative social interventions.
In the 1980s, a number of politicians in the United States also pushed “tough on crime” policies to address public fears about violent crime, and these policies have lingered ever since, leading to an extremely large prison population nationally, and calls for criminal justice reform. Many people put in prison during that era remain in jail today.
But not every state's incarceration rate is the same. For example, some states have decriminalized drugs like marijuana in an effort to combat sending non-violent offenders to jail. Possession of marijuana had been found to be enforced with a racial bias, as well, so states that have decriminalized have worked to address glaring racial disparities in the criminal justice system.
Stacker compiled statistics about incarceration demographics in Virginia using data from the Sentencing Project. All data is from 2019 unless otherwise specified.
Virginia by the numbers
- Total incarcerated, prison and jail: 64,781
--- Prison population: 36,091
--- Prison incarceration rate per 100,000: 422 (#16 highest among all states)
--- Jail population (2013): 28,690
--- Jail incarceration rate per 100,000 (2013): 450 (#7 highest among all states)
- Private prison population: 1,540
- Probation population: 65,520
- Parole population: 1,921
- Life sentences (2020): 2,867
--- Life without parole (2020): 1,628
--- Juvenile life without parole (2020): 50
- White imprisonment rate per 100,000: 287 (#23 highest among all states)
- Black imprisonment rate per 100,000: 1,246 (#32 highest among all states)
--- Black to white ratio: 4.3
- Hispanic imprisonment rate per 100,000: 135 (#43 highest among all states)
--- Hispanic to white ratio: 0.5
- Corrections expenditures: $1,488 million
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