In the Big House… Just visiting

Prisons have always been fascinating. They’ve been the subject of songs, films and TV series.

The Eastern State Penitentiary was built in 1829 and closed in 1971. It’s a massive, crumbling building with ivy-covered walls. This was for nearly a century and a half the place nobody wanted to go, an now, people are paying to get in. From the mid-1980s many tourists passed through the forbidding gates of Eastern State. With audio tour guides at their ears, they go through cellblocks; gaze at the mess halls, hospital and prison chapel; climb into a guard tower; and pace in the exercise yard. Eastern State is just one of three dozen prisons and jails drawing millions of visitors each year around the country. Prisons proudly display cells once inhabited by famous criminals. Some show gallows or an electric chair. In one of the blocks, the original cells are display. Each with a heavy oak door and a small round window in the ceiling. Eastern State also followed an 1820s reformist theory about correction. Which said that solitude was the path to rehabilitation. All prisoners were kept in solitary to reflect on their crimes. To maintain the quiet, guards even put socks over their shoes to muffle their footsteps. But some commentators thought that the lack of human contact would drive prisoners insane. Eastern State was very influential, and 300 prisons were built on its model.

There is even a proposal to open a museum at Sing Sing in Ossining (New York). But it hasn’t been opened so far because of the cost and the doubts in some quarters about the wisdom of opening it.

In some prisons, people are actually paying to stay over. Like for example in Boston. The 1851 Charles Street Prison on Beacon Hill has changed into a hotel called ‘The Liberty’. You can find in this hotel vestiges of jail cells in the lobby and bars on several of the windows. Also in Amsterdam, Istanbul and Oxford prisons changed into hotels.

In 1971 the National Park Service opened the Alcatraz prison that is situated on an island in San Francisco Bay. This prison was built in only 5 years, on the assumption that interest would stop. It became one of the biggest tourist attractions in Northern California and it even offers even touristic tours. This prison has been recently renovated and expanded and welcome over one million visitors a year.

Soon states and cities with their former prisons began to wonder if they could turn these buildings into moneymakers. And at the same time preservationist became advocates for saving prisons from being destroyed. A new trend was born and prisons are open to the curious, but you have to buy a ticket if you want to enter.