Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 3, 1993 TAG: 9301030039
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
LETTER-WRITER TRANSFERRED TO PRISON
Woodrow Scurry was prepared to spend Christmas in jail.Prison was something else.
Two days before Christmas, at 6:15 a.m., a jailer walked into a third-floor cellblock of the Roanoke City Jail and ordered Scurry to pack up his belongings.
Scurry, who already has served more than half his sentence for driving a car after being declared a habitual offender, was suddenly being transferred to a state prison.
In the past four months that Scurry has been an inmate in the city jail, he left his mark on pod 3-E and the men who shared it with him.
He became the unofficial leader of the pod, starting his own behavior modification and Bible study classes. Scurry - who has a checkered past of both criminal and altruistic exploits - said he tried to help every inmate. He tutored the illiterate, counseled the troubled, calmed the rowdy.
Scurry chronicled his efforts in a steady stream of letters to the Roanoke Times & World-News, which published excerpts in a "Letters from Jail" series about life in the city's severely overcrowded jail.
The series was intended to run occasionally as long as Scurry was in jail.
However, less than a month after the first story was published, a letter from Scurry arrived with a new return address - the Tazewell Correctional Unit in Tazewell County, where he was taken Dec. 23.
Usually, the Department of Corrections does not take inmates from local jails unless they are serving sentences of five years or more. Scurry's sentence is two years and three months, and he could be up for parole in much less time than that.
State inmates with less than five years usually are left to serve their time in local jails, and jail officials have even complained that the state is slow in taking those with more than five years.
Given all that, Scurry wonders why he was transferred.
"I think the story had something to do with it, and I think my visibility in the jail had a lot to do with it," Scurry said last week in a telephone interview from the Tazewell prison.
Roanoke jail officials said they made no special requests to the state Department of Corrections to have Scurry moved out.
"We didn't try to do anything to get him out of here," said Maj. George McMillan of the city Sheriff's Department, which is responsible for running the jail. "We were just as surprised."
McMillan said the Department of Corrections sent a letter two weeks ago informing jail officials that Scurry and another inmate could be transferred to prison.
"I can only speculate why," McMillan said. He said the transfer probably was in response to repeated letters he has written asking the department to transfer state inmates out of the jail to relieve a severe overcrowding problem.
The jail, designed to house no more than 216 inmates, was holding 463 the day Scurry was moved, McMillan said. Of that number, 173 were state inmates with two years or more, and 50 had sentences greater than five years.
Because of holiday vacations, officials with the Department of Corrections were unavailable for comment last week.
Scurry, 54, has a record of achievements to counter criminal convictions of drunken driving, drug-dealing and malicious wounding. He attended Virginia Western Community College, wrote a column called "Beat the Street" for the Roanoke Tribune, worked as a volunteer in church missionary programs, and in 1984 reopened Mary's Kitchen, a shelter for the hungry and homeless. The shelter has since closed.
He also ran Supportive Opportunity Services Inc., a non-profit organization that provided counseling and other assistance to the poor and disadvantaged.
Scurry tried to continue his crusade to help people while behind bars, but none of his programs was recognized by the jail administration.
Still, jail officials conceded that Scurry, in his own way, took charge of pod 3-E, a cellblock that holds more than 20 inmates. He did it through his informal classes, by putting up inspirational posters on the cell walls, and with his smooth way of talking.
"He used a different approach to become the leader of the pod," McMillan said. Most cellblocks are ruled by the biggest and baddest of inmates.
As for his new home, Scurry said last week that he already has started teaching his classes and spreading his message of behavior modification to his new fellow inmates.
"I took up my classes where I left off in jail," he said.