Vintage solid brass Folger Adams prison key. Key originating from Joliet Correctional Center, Illinois. Number 51A5.

Size: 2 1/4 x 4 1/2 in. 

#2579 . 

Joliet Correctional Center (originally known as Illinois State Penitentiary and colloquially referred to as Joliet Prison, Joliet Penitentiary, the Old Joliet Prison, the Collins Street Prison, or simply the word “Joliet”) was a prison in Joliet, Illinois which opened in 1858. The prison was built with convict labor leased by the state to contractor Lorenzo P. Sanger and warden Samuel K. Casey. Both criminals and prisoners of war were confined there during the Civil War. By 1872 the population had reached 1,239, a record number for a single prison at the time. The prison was slow to modernize, with no running water or toilets in the cells until after 1910. In 1933 all female prisoners were moved to the Oakdale Women’s Reformatory (later known as Dwight Correctional Center) and the facility was used exclusively for male prisoners. Two of the most famous inmates were teenaged child murderers Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who were given life sentences in 1924. The duo went on to revamp the prison’s educational system, adding a high school curriculum to help inmates eventually obtain tertiary education, and their system spread to most other prisons in the United States by the middle of the century. In the late 1960s the US Army recruited “volunteers” at Joliet to conduct experiments on, unethically infecting most of the population with Hepatitis A. In 1975, members of several different Chicago street gangs took over a cell block and held multiple corrections officers hostage due to complaints about cell conditions. The incident amplified the legendary status the prison had acquired in the Midwest by then, mentioned in folk songs and by novelists, as well as serving as a filming location for several movies and television shows. The number of inmates peaked at 1,300 in 1990, and in 2000 there were still 541 full-time staff members serving the jail. Joliet closed as a holding prison in 2002 due to budget cuts and the obsolete and dangerous nature of the buildings, and all inmates along with most of the staff were transferred to Stateville Correctional Center in nearby Crest Hill. In 2018 the Joliet Area Historical Museum began offering tours of the penitentiary, and in 2023 the facility was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.