For the purposes of an article about a new book, The Missouri State Penitentiary: 170 Years Inside "The Walls" let’s use… bullet points (hee hee):
- The Missouri State Penitentiary was in use for 168 years, from 1836 to 2004. Prior to closing, it was the oldest operating penal facility west of the Mississippi River.
- *A violent escape attempt in 1905 resulted in the hanging of three of the four escapees (they were all caught) for crimes committed during the escape. “On the day of the hanging,” writes author Jamie Rasmussen, “newspapers proclaimed that the escapees had been ‘Jerked to Eternity.’”
- Also, during the early years of the prison, there were no provisions for heating. The stone walls were cold as you’d imagine, and prisoners had to huddle together for warmth in winter. Sleep often did not come. Prison reform would come later, but during the 19th century, prison was about punishment.
- As with many other prisons of the day, inmates at “The Walls,” as it was called, were prohibited from talking unless addressed by a guard. (The theory was that the imposed silence would force a man to contemplate his misdeeds.) They were also not allowed to look up, and they had to remove their caps when spoken to by an officer. The penalty for violating these dictums was flogging by whips, straps, and paddles. Flogging was frequent, and often lasted until the punishee begged for mercy.
- In 1841, the people of Missouri got real excited about a new kind of prisoner—the abolitionist. Three men managed to get inveigled by the very group of slaves they were trying to free. The brainwashed slaves warned their masters of the plot to secret them away in the night, the abolitionists were caught, and after being jailed, one of the freedom fighters was told that the pro-slavery sentiment was so high in the vicinity that “if you had been acquitted, you would all have certainly been murdered” by a mob.
- A problem that persists in the U.S. today, the for-profit prison run as a business changed the nature of the beast soon after the Missouri State Pen was opened. At first, prisoners endured hard labor, including the making of bricks. Soon, they were forced to labor outside the prison walls each day for private businesses. This “leasing system” led to widespread complaints by the Jeff City townies that the prisoner “element” was lowering the image of the town. The state pen had solved that problem by 1880, when no less than six individual factories had begun operating within prison walls. Inmates made shoes, clothing, twine, and saddle trees (wooden bases for horse saddles). This was even better for businessmen—they didn’t have to pay rent on a building. The justice system, however, labored under a wicked new weight—the incentive to put people in prison and keep them there, to be exploited as cheap labor by local businessmen. Many Jeff City businessmen became wealthy on the backs of these convicts, whom they also used to build their mansions, located not far from the prison. Wait—it gets worse. Prisoners who did not meet work quotas were—you guessed it—flogged. Finally, in 1917, prison reformers got the for-profit businesses out of the prison complex. (Privately run prisons, however, would inject the profit motive back into the penal system in the 20th century).
- The Missouri state pen has seen its share of famous residents. Anarchist Emma Goldman was incarcerated there, along with Pretty Boy Floyd. Sonny Liston learned the skills that would earn him the heavyweight championship in the prison boxing ring. James Earl Ray’s successful, cinematic escape from the prison by scrunching himself into a small ball, and burying himself beneath loaves of bread in a delivery truck, enabled him to pursue and assassinate his quarry, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.
- In 1953, a couple was executed side-by-side at the prison. Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Heady engineered the infamous Bobby Greenlease kidnapping. Hall shot and buried the six-year-old boy from a wealthy family shortly after Heady kidnapped him. Public outrage sped their execution, just two and half months after the crime. The criminals whispered “I love you,” to one another as they were dying in the gas chamber.
- A spectacular jailhouse-wide riot in 1954 included a raging fire, a standoff, and the murder of two “snitches” by other inmates during the chaos. The riot ended when a state trooper shot an inmate preparing to hurl a typewriter down at him from an upper tier. The trooper hit him square in the face, he died before his body hit the concrete, and the inmates, sensing a loss of momentum, stood down. When the dust cleared, four inmates had been killed, 29 were injured, and there were no escapes.
- Department of Corrections Director “Friendly Fred” Wilkinson became known for his compassion after taking the job in the ‘60s. He believed in trying to leach the anger out of inmates with sports and other activities, and actually constructed a mini-golf course within “The Walls.”
- Now that the superannuated prison has been shut down, visitors can tour it for fun, and even enjoy specific photography and overnight-ghost-hunt tours. Tourists can actually sit in “the chair” in the former gas chamber—it’s ghoulish.
Jamie Pamela Rasmussen, a prof in the Department of Criminology & Criminal Justice at Missouri State University, has done her homework—the book is a fascinating chronicle of the long history of a frequently barbaric, maximum-security institution. Her writing does occasionally suffer from a familiar academic dryness, but her subject is prison, which has a way of drawing seekers of the lurid (like yours truly), and the chapters are appealingly brief, too. The long life of the Missouri State Penitentiary tells the stories of prison reform, of criminal histories, of changing times and morals, and of how people have dealt with the persistent question of what to do with Cain after he slays Abel. To that end, The Missouri State Penitentiary: 170 Years Inside "The Walls" is both lurid and instructive, horrifying and important.
