When Louis Sawyer Jr.’s family visited him, they took a 14-hour road trip on an overnight bus to get to the federal penitentiary near Jonesville, Va. And that was one of the easier trips during his 25 years in the federal prison system.
Sawyer’s family packed their coolers with food and their overnight bags for a long weekend of short supervised visits in the Lee County prison yard and nights in a budget motel, trying to keep close ties with him while he was locked up. They made the grueling trip three or four times a year.
But when the U.S. prison system moved Sawyer to Louisiana, then to Texas, he asked his family to stop the visits.
“It was too much for them,” said Sawyer, who is now 60. Those were lonely years.
Sawyer, who served 25 years for murder, asked his family to stop visiting when he was moved farther and farther from D.C. (Carol Guzy/The Washington Post)
This is what happens to most prisoners from D.C. Because it does not have its own prison system, as a state would, D.C.’s roughly 4,000 inmates become property of the federal government.