Inside an Abandoned Illinois Prison Closed 20 Years Ago, Shakedown Room to Cells

This is a state prison in Illinois that closed more than 20 years ago. The first thing we found was a sign on the wall that read check pockets for keys, and the first room was the Men’s Shakedown. The exact location stays off this page.

The grounds are a spread of separate buildings, and the video moves through them one at a time.

What we found

Around the shakedown room there are signs for an inmate witness request, a captain’s office and a female shakedown. Papers cover the floor, including an evacuation plan for the Department of Corrections, visitor records, a property by location code sheet and an employee time record. I’m not showing the visitor records, since they have people’s private information on them. A pane of glass had a design in it I couldn’t make out because of the light.

The next building was a lunch hall, with chairs I liked, a dish room, and some blue gloves. The paint is peeling off in whole sheets. There’s a lot of paperwork in here too, and one room was a barber shop. This building is used for training right now, and I saw furniture in it, though it didn’t look like fire training.

Past the kitchen are the actual cells, with bunks still in them. The bathroom is full of records, tons of them, moldy papers, a toxic substance log, and some old prison books. There were little shoes, an old computer with clothing next to it, and a couch that pulled out into a bed. Upstairs I found another bed marked number 23, a bathroom of urinals, and a pair of prison shoes, Reebok basketball mids priced at $52. Three beds sit in one room. A door kept banging in the wind, which was the noise upstairs.

Back at the dish room and food prep room, the peeling paint is insane. Outside there’s even a basketball court. From there we went to a second building, another lunch hall or mess room, with the words state penitentiary on it.

The third building looked like a maintenance building. Old urinals sat there, pulled out of the cells. There were two old phones, one pink and one brown, a dinky furnace, and a giant hole in the roof.

The rest were not what we expected. One building was a barn with stables and barrels of chemicals, which looked like something a farmer was using. There were refrigerant cans, a go cart, old goggles, a tool room with a huge pile of nails, a golf cart with the engine missing, and old corn that I offered to pay a quarter to have someone eat. Another storage building had collapsed, with so many holes in the roof that it had been shoved to the sides.

The last stop was a house in the middle of the grounds, completely gutted. It said it was remodeled in 1949 for the Department of Public Safety, and I think it was the warden’s house.

Why places like this end up empty

I can’t say what closed this particular prison, but a different Illinois prison shows how it goes. The state announced the closure of a women’s prison in February 2012 as a cost cutting move. It moved 961 incarcerated women to another facility, and 315 of its 351 workers stayed with the state, according to WTTW News.

A decade later, the same report says, weeds and trees were growing through the barbed wire, some windows had bullet holes, and a burnt car sat in the parking lot. A security guard patrols it. The only use it had then was as a training site for local fire and law enforcement agencies.

The warden’s house was the last building in the video, and nothing was left inside it.