In 1881 an architect called William Brown
and an iron foundry owner called Benjamin Haugh
patented an idea for a new type of jail.
The Rotary Jail.
In hindsight, it was not a good idea
It's impractical, unsafe, and massively overcomplicated.
But that didn't stop them selling the idea
to a few towns across the United States.
And the first one was built here, in Crawfordsville, Indiana.
And while it hasn't held prisoners for decades,
it is the only one where the mechanism still works.
We have a two story rotary jail,
and there are eight cells on each floor.
It weighs approximately 30 tonnes, it's made of steel.
It's operated by a hand crank, the hand crank moves both
floors of the jail at exactly the same time.
It doesn't touch any of the walls, it doesn't touch the bars
the whole machine sits around a central cylinder
that runs from the roof to the sewer system.
And it works like a pin, all of the weight of it rests
on the lip on top of that pin.
It's just a marvel of engineering for its time.
The advantage of having a rotational cell block
was that you could have just the one opening,
the inmates could enter/exit their cells from
in front of a pie shaped cell block.
So if you only had one door to watch, then you didn't have
to pay as many guards to be here to watch the inmates.
There's just one way out.
The half-moon seat shapes are toilets, they've been welded shut.
So when our jail was built in the 1880s our inmates had
indoor plumbing and toilets inside their cells when
most of the country didn't have it in their homes.
But some of the issues with the jail are that from 1882
until 1938 there was just one opening on each floor.
And there's an independently operating sliding door
that locks closed on each floor to keep inmates just from
jumping out whenever they want to.
If there was a fire, you risked having to have a guard
stand there and crank out each cell one by one
to get the inmates to safety.
The other issue is that almost 50% of our inmates were
arrested for being drunk, some of them would over spill
from the drunk tank and need to be in the cells
to make room for other inmates as they came in.
So they would fall asleep on the ground, hugging the bars
and the machine would begin to move,
and essentially the wall would come into contact
with their limbs and break them or amputate them.
They quit rotating the jail in 1938,
they cut an individual door out of every cell
and they installed the catwalk.
So they quit rotating it because the problems that they had
with fire concerns and with inmates
getting limbs chopped off.
As far as we've been told, as long as we keep maintenancing
the machine the way that we do and treating it
the way that we do, there's no end in sight.
We'll be able to turn it forever.
There are any number of ways that this could have been improved.
The bars could have spun, not the cells.
or you could remove the complicated, expensive rotation
part entirely, and just, you know, open one cell at a time.
Which is basically a regular jail.
The moral of the story?
Just because an idea has been patented
doesn't mean that it's actually any good.
Just means no one's thought of it before
and sometimes there's a reason for that.