July 20, Squirrel Cage Jail, Council Bluffs, IA

 

 

One of the strangest and oddball places we ever visited was the Pottawattamie County Jail in Council Bluffs, IA, just over the state line from Omaha.   

Built in 1885, the jail is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.  The building is a Squirrel Cage Jail, also known as a Rotary Jail.

At a cost of $30,000, the building was one of 18 such jails that were built in the United States and the only one that was three stories tall.

 

All the meals for the prisoners were prepared in this small kitchen.

The front part of the jail contains a kitchen and a space that was used as an office for the jailer.

  The rest of the building is made up of pie-shapped cells that revolved inside of a cage.

The building was used as a jail until 1969.

 

The hole in the back of the cell was used as a toilet. 

 

The idea for the rotary style jail was to produce a jail in which prisoners can be controlled without the necessity of personal contact between them and the jailer. 

 An entire jail full of prisoners could all be controlled by just one jailer.

Instead of going to the cells, the jailer could bring the cells and prisoners to him by simply turning a crank.

Unfortunately, the turntable gears kept jamming.  The drum weighted 45 tons empty, balanced on a three-foot-square base that kept shifting in unstable soil. 

 The top of the cage is suspended from a single iron beam.

Part of what made the Squirrel Cage Jail so uniquely bad was its inability to segregate inmates.  Chicken thieves and prostitutes were housed with rapists and killers.

Broken legs and arms were routine for prisoners who stuck their limbs through their cell bars as the cage spun.

The jailer and his family lived on the top floor apartment.  The wife was employed as a cook preparing meals two times a day for the prisoners.

 

 

  The meal trays were delivered through a slot.  

Looking down from the private apartment of the jailer. 

Solitary confinement was so narrow that there was only room to stand up.

In 1960 the Fire Marshall permanently disabled the drum after it took two days to reach the corpse of a prisoner who’d died in his cell.