The Illinois State Penitentiary at Joliet, established in 1858 in a city incorporated in 1852, became closely identified with Joliet and helped fix its reputation as America's “Prison City.” It emerged from a reform effort after Illinois's first state penitentiary, the privately run Alton Penitentiary opened in 1833, drew criticism for abusive conditions and weak state oversight. After Dorothea Dix inspected Alton in 1847 and reported her outrage to the state legislature, plans began for a new state penitentiary in Joliet, while oversight improved through three commissioners appointed by the governor and reporting to the Illinois General Assembly. Construction began with the building now called the North Seg Building, completed in the fall of 1857, and on May 22, 1858, fifty-three prisoners from Alton arrived by train to begin building the prison around themselves with stone quarried nearby. By 1865, the Administration Building and Cellhouses, later likened by Nathan Leopold to a “castle on the Rhine,” were completed as an intentionally foreboding display of state power in castellated Gothic style by W.W. Boyington and Otis Wheelock, with Joliet limestone also used by Boyington in Chicago's Water Tower. The prison was also known as Joliet Correctional Center, Collins Street Prison, and the Joliet State Penitentiary, and it is now called the Old Joliet Prison. It is often associated with or mistaken for the larger Stateville Penitentiary, opened by 1925 about five miles northwest at the former prison farm in what is now Crest Hill, but Joliet remained open for maximum security inmates until early 2002 despite repeated efforts to close it. The property included the state's first women's penitentiary, opened east of Collins Street in 1896 after women had previously been housed on the upper floors of the Administration Building, as well as nearly 130 acres of former quarry land and a surviving conveyor building used to move and crush stone. Over nearly 150 years, the prison's interior built environment reflected changing ideas about imprisonment, shifting from an industrial complex where convict labor was leased to private manufacturers toward a mid-twentieth-century emphasis on education, spiritual well-being, and work serving state interests.
