Forty-Two Jails You Can Walk Into

Forty-two stops in this index are places people were locked in. Twenty-three states. Almost all of them are open to visitors now, and the reason is architectural before it is anything else.

You cannot convert a jail

A disused school becomes flats. A disused church becomes a climbing gym or a brewery. A disused bank becomes a restaurant, and the vault becomes the private dining room, and everybody enjoys the joke.

A jail resists all of that. The cells are too small to live in and too strong to remove cheaply — the whole point of the construction was that it could not be taken apart from the inside. The windows are wrong. The plumbing is communal and in the open. Demolition is expensive because the walls were built to be expensive to get through.

So a county with a decommissioned jail has three options: knock it down at considerable cost, let it stand empty, or charge people to look at it.

Which produces a peculiar kind of museum

The Anamosa State Penitentiary Museum in Iowa sits beside a prison that is still operating — the museum is in the old cheese factory the inmates once ran. Brushy Mountain in Tennessee closed in 2009 and reopened as a tour, a distillery and a concert venue, in a building where James Earl Ray was held. The Missouri State Penitentiary in Jefferson City ran from 1836 to 2004 and now offers history tours by day and paranormal investigations by night.

That last combination is the common one, and it is worth being honest about what it is. The ghost tour subsidises the history tour. A building this expensive to heat needs a revenue stream that runs after dark.

The small ones are the strange ones

The big penitentiaries have a story that survives the transition — a famous inmate, an escape, a reform movement. The county jails do not.

The Allegan County Old Jail in Michigan is now the historical society. The Cliff Jail in Clifton, Arizona was blasted into the side of a rock face in 1881 by a man who, the story goes, was the first person locked in it after celebrating its completion too enthusiastically. Nobody famous went through either. They are open because they are there, and because a town with one historic building does not get to choose which one it is.

What you are actually looking at

There is a version of this visit that is about crime, and a better version that is about the century that built these things.

An 1880s county jail tells you how many people a town of two thousand expected to need to hold at once, which is usually four. A 1930s cell block tells you that the answer had changed. And a building like the Missouri State Penitentiary, running for a hundred and sixty-eight years, shows you every theory of what a prison was for, stacked on top of each other in the same walls — because nobody ever had the budget to start again.

Go for the architecture. The ghost tour will find you anyway.