(peaceful electronic music) (rhythmic male voices sing) - [Narrator] For about 150
years, Colorado's prisons have locked up some of
history's best outlaw stories from the lawless
West to America's toughest prison today, Supermax. The state's relationship
with crime and punishment started even before
statehood and includes a cannibal, an 11-year-old
murderer, prison breaks, and one of the most ruthless
wardens in recent memory. Through it all,
Colorado's first prison, nicknamed Old Max, remains
a beautifully preserved testament to how we have
built the walls of justice. From the state's first prison
to today's Prison Valley, Cañon City has always been
the place to call home if you're a criminal behind bars or one who keeps
those bars closed. Walk into Colorado's first
prison for a rare glimpse of law and order
from the inside. It turns out these
walls can talk. - [Male Announcer] This
program was made possible by the History Colorado
State Historical Fund. - [Female Announcer]
Supporting projects throughout the state to preserve,
protect, and interpret Colorado's architectural
and archeological treasures. History Colorado
State Historical Fund. Create the future,
honor the past. - [Male Announcer] With
support from the Denver Public Library,
History Colorado, and the Colorado Office of
Film, Television, and Media. With additional support
from these organizations and viewers like you. Thank you. (wistful piano music) (upbeat orchestral music) (tinny drums tap) - [Narrator] After
gold was discovered in the Colorado
Territory in 1858, tens of thousands of men
flooded into the West. With that rush came
crowding, chaos, and crime. But there weren't
yet any prisons to house the additional influx
of scoundrels and scofflaws giving the area a
lawless reputation. This was a problem for
those dreaming of statehood. - Colorado was interested
in becoming a state. It needed to represent
itself to the United States of America as a lawful place. - One of the things that
Congress did was notice that prisons are part of the
understanding, at the time, of what a civilized society was. We have to see the creation
of a territorial prison in the bigger picture
of, what do you have as a unit of American society
that is a civilized place and shows that reputable,
ambitious people want to live there? So you just get going
on a university. You should get going on
choosing your capitol and getting that set up in
a very respectable manner, that this will be a place of
stolid and sober governance. A prison is a part of that. - [Carol] When we think
about why Coloradoans wanted a major incarceration
facility in Cañon City or anywhere in the latter
years of the 19th century, some of that has to
do with local needs. - [Patty] We can't
take it for granted that incarceration was
just what people always did to respond to crime,
or to lawlessness, or to troubling behavior. First territorial
governor, William Gilpin, is one of those people who says, boy, there's too many
men in this population. In a mining community
you have a lot more men than you have women,
it's unbalanced, too many men detached
from families. This is gonna be disorderly, this is going to be
a threat to property. This is going to
rattle us in every way, so we must take a stand
against this lawlessness. There's a process
of deliberation in
the United States. Philadelphia and New York
were the centers of that, of saying, what should
we do as a society when people have gone
outside our boundaries and behaved in ways that
we want them to stop, we want them to give it up
and not do that anymore? - There was an important part of the application
portfolio to become one of the United States
for Colorado to have an incarceration facility
of the sophistication or the vision of
statewide law keeping that states further
back East had developed in the prior decades. The federal
government moved into the Rocky Mountain states
establishing prisons to just set order
on the landscape. - [Carol] Congress
then passes a law to support the creation
of territorial prisons. Colorado is quick on the draw and gets into action very fast, leads other territories
in proposing to Congress that they should have
a territorial prison. - [Patty] A Cañon City attorney and territorial
legislator, Thomas Macon, led the drive to locate
the new Colorado Prison in Cañon City. Happily for Macon's ambitions,
planning for the first prison happened at about the
same time as the debate over where the state
capitol would be located. - He was in a situation
to do some vote trading. Denver wants the capitol,
Golden wants the capitol. So Thomas Macon plays the part
in saying, I'll help Denver. And then if he helps Denver,
then a lot of other people then have to do
something for him. Once Denver gets that capitol, then Thomas Macon gets
a lot of cards to play to say southern Colorado
deserves that prison. So Cañon City gets the
territorial prison. - [Patty] Another supporter
of building a penitentiary in Fremont County,
Jonathan Draper, donated a 25-acre parcel
of land for the new prison, so supporters looking
for economic opportunity now had a location
and a beginning. - 1868, there's
drawing of plans, and they're scaling
the plans down to meet the available money,
and then there's looking for contractors
who will take that and choosing among them, and
having some of them withdraw and give up, and then the
actual start of construction. So it's quite a production
to get it going. First prisoner, 1871,
so that's pretty fast. - The original cell house
was built out of stone that was actually quarried
from right behind the facility and the inmates are the
ones who built the wall. - I think one of the
most striking things to people who visit the
Museum of Colorado Prisons, for instance, is to
look at photographs of Territorial, which
is a stone building in its earliest
form without a wall. - [Stacey] They purposely
did not put a wall around the initial cell house
because they thought that most of the inmates
would be working on ranches. In fact, there was a sign
that said, Be back by sundown or the doors would be locked. - The boundaries of the prison
were much more permeable than they are now, and
in fact many inmates, or convicts, as they were
called in those times went back and forth into town
as trustees had jobs in town. - But that didn't
work out well because they were causing mayhem. In fact, they had an escape
early on where inmates overpowered the guard
and took some weapons and were running amok
around in Fremont County. The public was outraged. - [Narrator] By 1875,
a wall suddenly seemed like a pretty good
idea, and the first one was built around the compound. - [Patty] When they were
talking about what the cost of the wall would be and the
labor that it would entail, they knew they
already had a quarry, so they used the stone
from that same quarry. - [Carol] We have this
beautiful stone wall and in that stone wall
we've got several stones that have carvings on them,
along with inmate numbers. We have a hand with a
heart in the center. We've got a couple
of arrowheads, people writing their names
and numbers in the stone. (guitar twangs) - [Narrator] Once
the wall went up, a very interesting
assortment of lawbreakers ended up in the Colorado
State Penitentiary including, Alferd Packer. In the winter of 1874, Packer
and a group of prospectors had found themselves in
a desperate situation, trapped by severe weather
in the San Juan Mountains. Packer was the only
one to survive. His companions were
found murdered. He never actually confessed to
the murder of his companions, but Packer did admit
to cannibalizing them. - [Stacey] What hasn't been
said about Alferd Packer. He was originally
convicted of murder and was sentenced to death,
but there was a little loophole so they had to retry him. Instead of putting him up
for another murder charge he had already admitted to
killing one of the miners. They convicted him
on manslaughter. So he was in prison
not for cannibalism, nor for murder, but
for manslaughter. - [Narrator] Though the
Colorado State Penitentiary has typically been reserved for
adult offenders like Packer, in 1893, 11-year-old convicted
murderer, Anton Woode, was considered too dangerous to be housed at a reform school, so he was placed behind
bars in Cañon City. - He was 10 when he
committed the crime of murder that he admitted to, and
11 when he was incarcerated at the Colorado
State Penitentiary. Believe it or not, it's
actually a success story. He was taken care
of by the inmates. When he left prison
at the age of 23, he was fluent in three
different languages. He played the violin
and piano so well he actually taught other
people how to play. One of his paintings was on
display at the World's Fair. He was taken to Aurora, New
York, to an artist commune where he taught other people
how to play the violin. He fell in love with a
young lady that he met on the Hudson River
while he was drawing. She ended up being the daughter
of a retired federal judge. They married, they
moved to Minneapolis, where evidently he never had
any interactions with the law. (moody undertones pulse) - [Narrator] When the
prison first opened in 1871 the staff was small: one
warden and six guards, and at that time, guards
mainly handled keys rather than prisoners. - One of the sharpest
contrasts between contemporary incarceration practices
and historical ones is the role of
correctional officers. In the early days, correctional
officers were often elderly. It was not a particularly
high-stress kind of environment. They were called turnkeys. They are seen in
photographs alongside people in striped clothes. That's not so true now
in a world in which there is undergraduate education
for correctional officers. They are now trained to
be not quite but almost social workers in the sense
that they're very supportive of the various kinds of
rehabilitative programs. Part of their role is not
just to keep everyone safe, but also to support the growth and rehabilitation of offenders. - [Narrator] Although prison
guards in the late 1800s weren't concerned
with reforming anyone, they had another
problem: overcrowding. Convicts greatly outnumbered
their accommodations. Authorities did
add more buildings to the original prison site, but it was still
woefully inadequate, especially for an influx
of female prisoners. - The Colorado Territorial
Prison opened in 1871, and from that year
until about 1900, there were only about 99
women incarcerated there. But in 1884, the officials
decided that they needed a separate space
for women prisoners, and so six cells were
built above the laundry and washhouse area
within the prison walls. In 1895, a separate
building with about 40 cells was built just outside
the prison walls and that was enclosed
within its own set of walls. In 1908, an additional
building was built for female prisoners. This one had 40 cells
and a space for kitchens, laundry, and washroom. During the territorial days,
the prison was accepting female prisoners from other
territories and states because some of those places
didn't have the facilities to incarcerate some of
the women who were accused of more serious crimes. Women prisoners really were kind of disproportionately punished in terms of their
male counterparts, especially during
the 19th century, during the Victorian era. Anything that a woman did
that was sort of contradictory to the ideal of womanhood was
really punished quite harshly, and especially women of color, women in economically
disadvantaged situations, poorly educated women
really felt the brunt of this sort of
societal judgment. - [Narrator] Beyond the
increase of women prisoners, a lack of adequate housing
for all the convicts caused a constant
state of overcrowding. In 1929, some of the
prisoners decided it was intolerable
and they rioted. (explosions and
people screaming) Led by convicted killer Danny
Daniels, a group of convicts made demands that Warden F.E.
Crawford would not accept. So the National Guard
was brought in to try to end the chaos. In the end, it was the
bloodiest prison rebellion in Colorado history. (film projector clicks) But just three years
later, in 1932, there was a new warden in town. - The wardens have
been major figures in Colorado history, and
I think that the story of mid-20th-century
wardens is a great way to think about the
history of incarceration. In Colorado, Roy Best was
such an amazing character, a larger-than-life
sort of person, a harsh person in many
ways, but in other ways a very warm person in that
he took disabled inmates into his circle of affection. - There's a prisoner who
had mental disabilities who had committed
a capital crime, and was gonna be put to death. Roy Best really tried to help
him and really tried to see if he could reduce that penalty. - [Narrator] With
Roy Best as warden, prison life could be dramatic, practically right
out of a movie. One suspenseful incident
occurred in December 1947 when convicted murderer
James "Mad Dog" Sherbondy led 11 other inmates
on a daring escape. Two inmates were killed and
the others were recaptured. But that wasn't the
end of the story. - Hollywood came
calling January of 1948. Really thought the
escape was fascinating, wanted to show it on film. They billed the movie Cañon City as the very first docudrama. So they wanted permission
to film inside the prison. It's an active prison. So they had to talk to Roy
Best, and the story goes that Roy Best said, I'll
let you film in the prison as long as I get to play
myself in the movie. Well, that was
evidently agreed upon because they filmed
inside the prison. Inmates were some of the extras and Roy Best got to play
himself in the movie. They actually flew
him to New York City for the world premiere
in June of 1948. - [Narrator] The film
might have been called a docudrama, but it
did not document some of Roy Best's management style. He was a great proponent
of corporal punishment. To keep rule breakers in
line, Best used a device called the Old Gray Mare. Offenders were bent over
a sawhorse-like setup, thus the Old Gray Mare nickname. They were strapped
down and flogged with a leather strap
studded with tacks. Women prisoners were not
subjected to the Old Gray Mare. By the 1930s, attitudes about
female convicts had softened. Roy Best even wanted to
build them a new facility. - In 1935, the Colorado Women's
Prison, a separate entity, was built adjacent
to the prison walls. This building had 30
cells on the main floor and then a basement
with laundry, kitchen, the the dining area. - You can look at the
house-like women's incarceration facility, homey is maybe
a little bit of a stretch, but house-like isn't,
and then turn around and look at the great wall
separating the men's prison from the rest of the
world and see that there's just a low stone wall
around the women's prison, the assumption being that
women are not about escape. I think the assumption behind
that building in the 1930s was, women were there
because they were damaged. Their criminality was
virtually medicalized. It was a disorder, and what
this relatively healthful, house-like environment
was going to do was bring them back into
ordinary femininity. Women did some
amount of gardening but much of their energy
was aimed toward cooking, textiles, sewing, making
underwear for the men. - [Narrator] Yet, as needs
for women prisoners changed over time, so did
the facilities. In 1988, after a new, modern
women's penitentiary was built, the old women's prison
became a museum, a memorial to crime and
punishment, preserved with care. - In the rehabilitation
from the prison to a museum, we kept all the cells;
they're the original cells. The bars on the windows
are the original bars on the windows. The kitchen is intact,
and the laundry room is the exact same
appliances that were there when it was a functioning
prison in 1935. The floor plan is
basically the same. - The building is painted
kind of an institutional green and it looks really very
similar to what it looked like when it was built in 1935. It's almost like
walking back in time. The architectural style,
the Mediterranean style, is really distinct
for that time period. And so the preservation
of the prison and the rehabilitation
from an active prison to a museum are
really important. The preservation of the
museum really allows you to imagine what it
would have been like to be incarcerated there. (acoustic guitar music) - [Narrator] The
experience of being locked inside this prison
depended greatly on who the warden
happened to be. Wardens Wayne Patterson
and Harry Tinsley had a distinctly lighter
touch than Roy Best. - Tinsley had a
different sense that explicit rehabilitation,
that human engagement, rather than work and
punishment, as had been Best's philosophy,
would bring people back into the outside world. And some said then, and
some would still say, that he was too nice,
that he was too kind, that it wasn't effective. His compassion for the people
with whom he was working, his sense that his real goal
was rehabilitation, is vivid. And there are people
alive in Cañon City today who remember that
wardenship and remember the extraordinary shift to
that rehabilitative model. Wayne Patterson followed in
that pattern and, in general, his policy as well was
rehabilitative and educational. - Wayne Patterson
definitely wanted people to know about the prison. He encouraged
folks in Cañon City to learn about it
by offering tours of the Colorado
State Penitentiary. Through his whole tenure as
warden into the mid-1970s, visitors could come into
the prison and really walk through the cells and
really see what it was like. He believed that the more
people knew about the prison the more they would support
what was going on there. - [Narrator] Just down the
hill from the old prison stands the deputy warden's
house, built in 1901 with stone from the same quarry that
supplied the prison itself. The Queen Anne-style house
features a dominating three-story tower with an
eye towards any trouble. - The house is outside
the walls of the prison. If anything was to
happen inside the walls they couldn't take the
deputy warden hostage, but they were close
enough to respond to any problems
that might occur. The deputy warden's
house is definitely an iconic building
here in Cañon City. A lot of people think
it's the warden's home because it's so decorative. They'll see the stained
glass, you'll see the stone creatures that are sitting
out front, the original porch. - [Narrator] The Department
of Corrections used the house from the mid-1970s
to 2007 as housing for juvenile delinquents
and administrative offices. It now sits vacant and in
need of major restoration. It was listed in the National
Register of Historic Places in 2001 because of the
architectural significance of its Queen Anne style. There are other examples
of this architecture in the Cañon City area,
but this house is unusual with its oversized
tower and twin lions gracing the front walkway. - [Carol] It's on Colorado's
Most Endangered Places List. We're working very hard with
the Department of Corrections and the state to try
and save the building. - [Patty] The bones are good,
it just needs a little TLC. - [Narrator] Preserving
the legacy of Colorado's first prison is considered
an essential part of preserving the
history of Colorado. The original west
wall still stands and several gun towers
constructed in the 1920s remain overseeing what is still
an active penitentiary. - Their beautiful
quarried stone, you can see where the
original windows were. And then when they
added the barbed wire and then razor wire, they
extended those towers up to be higher. The Soda Springs Tower
is very interesting. Just that it's beautiful,
it's no longer being used, because we no
longer have a spring that the general
public would come to. Early on in the 1800s,
there was a soda spring and people used to
come from all around to drink from this spring. Since it's so close to the
prison, they built a tower and that tower was known
as the Soda Spring Tower. So an officer used to
stand in that tower to make sure the general
public didn't try to come onto the prison land. We lost that spring in the '70s when Highway 50 was expanded. - [Narrator] Colorado's
original prison no longer sits alone on a hill. Cañon City has grown right
up to this stone fortress and now there are
many other places for criminals to
reside in the area. Ten other state and federal
facilities have joined Old Max in what's rightfully become
known as Prison Valley. - The most important
things about prisons are the questions we don't ask. It's easy to see what's there. It's not so easy to see
what's behind the scenes. Who is in prison is the most
important thing about prisons. And I think we learn that from
looking at them across time. We want to know why
people are there in order to understand both
how they're best supported or might best reenter
society, and also to stop other people from having
the kind of experience that brought them there. Incarceration is
such a vivid element of the landscape of Colorado. My goodness,
Florence, Cañon City. Wow, that's a lot of
incarceration going on there. - Fremont County
remains a place where a significant percentage of
the population are inmates and where an even larger
portion of the population are people working
for the prisons. - [Narrator] In the late
1800s, legislator Thomas Macon had a vision for his hometown. Macon's push to build
the state's first prison in Cañon City proved
to be very productive for his time and ours. (acoustic guitar music) (wistful piano music) (upbeat orchestral music)
