![]() ![]() The Joliet Prison was planned for a 72-acre site just north of the city limits on a large plot of land bounded by Collins Street on the east and the busy Illinois and Michigan Canal and railroad tracks on the west. ![]() Sanger oversaw construction using prison labor from Alton. The prison was built and run on the cost-efficient “Auburn Plan,” based on that at the Auburn prison in New York: prisoners slept in individual cells but worked together during the day. In 1857 the General Assembly appropriated money for the construction of a 1,000-cell facility in Joliet, in the northeastern part of the state, close to the booming city of Chicago. ![]() Illinois achieved statehood in 1818 and by the 1850s the state’s prison at Alton, in western Illinois, was severely overcrowded. The Joliet Correctional Center is an excellent example of this type of all-encompassing prison program. And the prison was the scene of various holiday celebrations and social activities for residents of the surrounding city, providing the prison warden with an elevated social status in the community. The prison was also a hub of local industry-prisoners were hired out to business owners to perform both menial and skilled labor. In the nineteenth century a prison was rarely just a fortified building to incarcerate men and women it was an iconic structure meant to convey the strength and seriousness of the law. ![]()
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