in 1881 an architect called William
Brown and an iron foundry owner called
Benjamin how 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 over
complicated 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 helped 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 tons it's made of steel
that's operated by a hand crank the hand
crank moves both floors of the gentleman
exactly at the same time it doesn't
touch any of the walls it doesn't touch
the bars the whole machine kind of 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 you know the advantage of having a
rotational cellblock was that you could
have just the one opening the inmates
can enter exit their selves from in
front of a pie shaped cellblock 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 Backman kind of seat
shapes our 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 for 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 risk 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 overspill 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 the machine
would have 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 maintenance a machine
the way that we do in 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
cells a time which is basically regular
jail the moral of the story just because
an idea has been patented doesn't mean
that it's actually any good
it just means no one's thought of it
before and sometimes there's a reason
for that
you