Word: lorton
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Prophecy became calamitous reality last week at the District of Columbia's Lorton Reformatory. Less than 48 hours after a report by Prison Consultant Kathryn Monaco predicted that "a major disturbance" could occur in the "near future" at the overcrowded prison in northern Virginia, Lorton inmates set fires that damaged at least 15 buildings. In rioting that followed, 27 inmates and six guards were injured...
...report helped trigger the riot. Inmates who saw accounts of the report, city officials claimed, concluded that they would be set free if they destroyed the prison. Some convicts actually packed their belongings in plastic garbage bags before the buildings were set afire. A number of prisoners did escape Lorton afterward, but not to freedom. Nearly 500 of the 1,300 inmates involved were shipped to other area jails...
...safes were taken to a Government warehouse in Virginia in August, then moved to Lorton. On Oct. 25, prison authorities found that one safe had "inadvertently" been left unlocked and unemptied. Among the documents inside: several binders stamped TOP SECRET containing the Secretary of State's morning summaries of embassy reports and other overseas intelligence from January to March...
Shocked State Department officials raced to Lorton and, after a quick investigation, determined that all the missing papers had been retrieved. So convinced was the State Department that it discounted a police informant's warning that more documents remained at Lorton. Four days later, WTTG in Washington, D.C., reported that top-secret documents were circulating among prisoners. An obliging inmate had slipped copies of the documents to a WTTG-TV reporter. The station then passed them on to Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland, who returned them to red-faced State Department officials...
...called in to scour Lorton. Meanwhile the State Department launched an urgent "damage assessment" to figure out if any U.S. secrets had been compromised. The problem is, because no microfilm records had been made, authorities could not be sure exactly what top-secret information the mislaid safe originally contained. In fact, the only certainty last week was that, in the words of one State Department official, "there sure as hell were lapses all over the place...