2017 Jeep Drive Bandon to Schnecksville

Rain this morning and for the first two hours of the drive to Jefferson City, MO. The tour of the Missouri Penitentiary started at 10AM and if I missed it, the next was at 1PM. Fortunately I got there about 20 minutes early so all was well. Our tour guide was a former guard from the prison so his knowledge of the later years was to some extent first hand. The prison was first built in 1836, the oldest prison and for a long time the only prison in the west. It was fascinating and depressing. The early philosophy of the prison was to make your time so miserable you would not want to ever come back so conditions were terrible, inhumane even.

No buildings from 1836 exist but one from 1868 was still in use when the prison closed in 2004. It housed the prisoners who were the best behaved and thus had a better existence.

They have stripped the lead based paint from all the walls but did not repaint it so it actually looks a bit worse than it did when they closed it down. Having said that, the cells were very small and at times during the prison's history contained as many as 8 to 10 inmates. Each cell had a bucket of water and a bucket to use as a toilet. The metal slat door is an original door from 1868, these were replaced in later years with bars and toilets and sinks were added. Since it was a facility for the good prisoners they were allowed to buy things like TVs and radios, paint their cells and make curtains.

In the basement area, there were showers for the prisoners but those showers, installed in the later 1900s were in the area where the dungeon cells were. The cells were still present behind the walls for the showers and accessible through a doorway. We went back into them. The cell size was about the same as the ones above ground but after the door was closed and locked, all lights were out and you were in total darkness. Again, there might be 6 or 8 people in the cell with you and your two buckets. These cells were for the trouble makers. I suspect most tried not to return but one poor fellow was there on and off for 5 years. He went blind (apparently a side effect of no light for long periods of time). I image many went mad as well. Here's the cell, with the lights on:

James Earl Ray was in this prison, I don't recall the crime, and he devised a successful escape by hiding in the bakery boxes that left the prison to supply other local prisons. Eleven months later, still on the lam from Missouri he shot Martin Luther King. Eventually captured and sent to a different prison he died of liver disease.

This prison had the state's gas chamber which was used 40 times. The chamber itself was made from a submarine to contain the cyanide gas that was generated to kill the prisoner. Here's the walk way up to the building that contained the chamber.