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The first 150 prisoners arrived by train from Columbus on 15 September 1896 and were put to work digging the sewers and building the twenty-five-foot wall around themselves.
It was built for young men on a first offence, a step between the boys' school at Lancaster and the penitentiary at Columbus. A sentence was eighteen months: improvement and you left, none and you got eighteen more. Levi Scofield picked Victorian Gothic, Richardsonian Romanesque and Queen Anne on purpose, to push inmates towards spiritual rebirth.
In the early 1960s the state pulled the funding from that model and made the place a maximum security prison. In the 1980s inmates sued over crowding and conditions and won; Judge Frank Battisti ordered it closed by the end of December 1986. It stayed open until December 1990: the replacement was not built. More than 200 people died inside.
Most of the complex came down afterwards, including the wall those first prisoners built. A preservation society bought what was left for one dollar.
The Shawshank Redemption used the administration building for most of its interiors. The six-tier east cellblock, the photograph everybody takes, is not in the film.
Photographers are let in outside visiting hours, in small groups, under written rules: no weapons even as props, no inmate or guard costumes, no handcuffs without permission. The working prisons next door may not be photographed at all.