(There’s a privately-run federal prison in Winton, NC; most of its inmates are from DC, 200 miles away.)

Lots of staff coming in now after military service, too. On the one hand, it’s good that they’re getting work. On the other, I think about how Charles Graner went from Desert Storm to the county jail to state prison back to Iraq and Abu Ghraib.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDCdbmwy9l8

(for those who weren’t around when screaming top-forty AM radio was king… CKLW was in Windsor, Ontario, right across the river from Detroit, and pretty much owned the youth market there in the Sixties and early Seventies. I mean, when Bob Seger writes, records, and releases a song about your program director just to try & get something on the air, you know you’re a big deal.

Anyway, “The Big 800″ did news twenty after the hour and twenty before while everyone else was doing top of the hour… and they had, let’s just say, a rather distinctive style.)

I’d argue that point.

If you’re incarcerated, you’re deliberately confined, for cause.

Imprisonment can be accidental. For instance, if you’re in a cabin with only one door that opens outward, you can be imprisoned by a snow storm while you sleep, or perhaps the wind blows down a tree, blocking the door.

There have been different theories as to why we lock people up for extended periods. They don’t just change the name of the institutions; they change the architecture, based on the theory.

Eastern State Penitentiary (“America’s Most Historic Prison”) was modeled after a monastery, built to give men plenty of time to reflect on their misdeeds and become better men. They spent their time in individual cells, each with a skylight and an outdoor exercise area. They were hooded when they left the cell, to minimize interaction with guards, among other reasons. When you went into stir, you ended up stir-crazy. Designed to be humanitarian, it turned out to be extremely cruel punishment.

The competing theory of the day was the Auburn System, which congregated prisoners, and had them work. The prison movies are mostly based on Auburn System prisons, such as Sing Sing. The Ohio State Pen was an Auburn System prison.

Although the Ohio State Pen added a lot of color (most of it gray) to Columbus, it ended up subtracting a lot of color when one of the exterior walls fell over onto a line of parked cars. Oops. They couldn’t keep people out of the prison grounds at that point. (Actually, a Columbus native told me that it wasn’t that difficult to get in before. He claimed to have done some exploration and vandalism as a teen.) If people could just waltz in, it was inevitable that someone was going to get killed there. They figured it made more sense to tear the place down than to fix the wall.

The lore around Columbus was that they originally wanted to use the Columbus prison for Shawshank Redemption, but it was in such bad condition, that they ended up filming in Mansfield, instead.

What did O. Henry do that got him incarcerated?

In 1894, money was missing from the Austin bank where he was working as a teller. He had started a humor magazine called “The Rolling Stone” but it failed in 1894, and he decided to leave town. He ended up traveling for a while in Central and South America, with Al Jennings, who was a thief. In 1897, he heard his wife was dying, so he returned, and while he was there, they convicted him of embezzling. It’s not clear he stole the money. Timing and bad company probably would have been enough to convict him, but leaving his family to fend for themselves surely didn’t get him much sympathy.

He got 5 years, and why he served time in Columbus, Ohio, when the bank was in Austin, Texas isn’t clear to me. He got out in 3 years. He worked as a pharmacist at the pen, and supposedly either got his pen name from a warder named Orrin Henry, or else from Eteinne-Ossian Henry, a pharmacist whose name is in the U.S.Pharmacopaeia.

Prisons are weird. Have you seen the photgraphs of Chris Jordan showing folded orange prison uniforms that stand for 2.3 prisoners in the US in 2005. Mind boggling. Scroll down to the photographs (all of the other ones are good too). http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=7