Prepare for prison - 10 things you might not know about prison
An inmate leans out the bars of his cell in a one-prisoner per cell block.(Brian Vander Brug/October10, 2005)
By Mark Jacob and Stephan Benzkofer -July 7, 2013Former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. and his wife, Sandi, are facing possible prison sentences next month. Meanwhile, Thomson prison in northwestern Illinois is again being discussed as a location for Guantanamo detainees. And "Sesame Street" has introduced an online teaching kit featuring a new Muppet named Alex whose father is in jail. So let's lock down 10 facts about incarceration:
1. In the late 1800s, Chicago businessmen purchased a former Confederate prison in Richmond, Va., dismantled it, shipped it to Chicago on 132 railroad cars and rebuilt it on Wabash Avenue from 14th to 16th streets. It became the Libby Prison War Museum but included non-Civil War items, such as the alleged "skin of the serpent that tempted Eve in the Garden of Eden." After about a decade, the old prison was torn down again, except for a castellated wall that became part of the new Chicago Coliseum. That arena, which hosted political conventions, the Blackhawks and even Jimi Hendrix, closed in the early 1970s.
2. The U.S. population has increased about 200 percent since 1920. The U.S. prison population has risen more than 1,900 percent.
3. In Bolivia's infamous San Pedro prison in La Paz, the 1,500 inmates have the run of the place. The guards generally stay outside the gates. The prisoners, who have to pay for their rooms, make money by selling groceries, working in food stalls, cutting hair, repairing TVs or radios and peddling drugs. The inmates also handle their own disputes, which leads to about four deaths a month, officials say. More disturbing: About 100 children — boys and girls — live in the prison with their fathers, a common practice in Bolivia.
4. Some prisons are nicer than others:
It is the Justice and Detention Centre in Leoben, Austria. Inmates of the 2005 facility enjoy amenities many law-abiding individuals would envy, such as floor-to-ceiling windows, private restrooms, balconies and a common room with a kitchenette. During the 2008 presidential campaign, photographs of the deluxe prison made the rounds on the Internet posing as a new Cook County jail under the headline, "Wow! Your Tax Dollars at Work" — and blamed on then-Sen. Barack Obama.
5. Johnny Cash, famed for writing "Folsom Prison Blues" and performing for inmates, had some scrapes with the law but never served time in prison, contrary to popular myth.
"In fact, I've never served any time at all in any correctional institution anywhere," he wrote. "During my amphetamine years I spent a few nights in jail, but strictly on an overnight basis: seven incidents in all, different dates in different places where the local law decided we'd all be better off if I were under lock and key."
6. Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich is doing time in Colorado, a state that may have more famous inmates than any other. While Blago is at the low-security Englewood facility, the Florence supermax about 100 miles south holds Sept. 11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui, Ted "The Unabomber" Kaczynski, FBI turncoat spy Robert Hanssen, Oklahoma City bomb plotter Terry Nichols, Olympics bomber Eric Rudolph and Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid.
7. When Mohandas Gandhi was held at Yeravda Prison for threatening the British occupation of India, he gave "prison food" a whole new meaning. He promised his mother he would always drink goat's milk instead of cow's milk, so authorities arranged for a goat to be brought into his cell and milked in his presence.
Yeravda Prison
8. "The land of the free" has a bigger share of its population behind bars than any other country in the world. According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, more than 700 U.S. residents per 100,000 are imprisoned, compared to 480 per 100,000 in Russia and somewhere between 121 and 170 in China. India's incarceration rate (30) is less than one-20th the U.S. rate.
9. People in prison have run for president (Socialist Eugene Debs, winning 913,664 votes in 1920), found the inspiration to write a classic (Miguel de Cervantes' "Don Quixote") and assembled a collection of more than 70,000 four-leaf clovers (Pennsylvania kidnapper George Kaminski).
10. Popular history has it that the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789, to free prisoners being held by the tyrannical Louis XVI. Not quite. The Parisian mob actually needed gunpowder for the muskets it had commandeered earlier that day. While it may be true that liberating the inhabitants was a secondary goal, just seven people were confined there, and two were quickly recaptured and moved to an insane asylum.
Mark Jacob is a deputy metro editor at the Tribune; Stephan Benzkofer is the weekend editor.