Have you ever wondered what it is like to walk the halls of a dark and mysterious prison? Have you ever wanted to stand in places where inmates once walked in an attempt to try and get a sense of what it would be like to spend the majority of your life, or even a portion of your life behind bars? If so, you are holding one of the most amazing books that can take you into all of these situations. This book is about a prison that was built in the rolling hills of Mansfield, Ohio in the1800s on a pre-existing civil war training camp where approximately 150,000 inmates served time For The crimes they may or even may not have committed. it covers topics from before the prison was built, during the building process, and after its completion. This book will cover an inmates stay and what he could experience during his incarceration and how this prison operated as a "city within a city".

What started as an institution to reform young and non-violent criminals became one of the most infamous prisons in American history. Before 1884, most first-time offenders between the ages of 16 and 30 were housed in the Ohio Penitentiary, where they were likely to be influenced by hardened criminals. That changed when the Ohio Legislature approved the building of a reformatory, a new type of institution that would educate and train these young men. Since its opening in 1896, the reformatory expanded its training programs and became a self-sustaining institution--the largest of its kind in the United States. By 1970, the reformatory had become a maximum-security prison filled with the most dangerous criminals in the U.S., with a death row but no death chamber. It closed on December 31, 1990, but preservation and restoration efforts are ongoing, and it continues to be as infamous today as in its heyday, appearing in numerous television shows and feature films, including The Shawshank Redemption.

Explore one of history’s most notorious maximum-security prisons through these tales of mayhem and madness. As “animal factories” go, the Ohio Penitentiary was one of the worst. For 150 years, it housed some of the most dangerous criminals in the United States, including murderers, madmen and mobsters. Peer in on America’s first vampire, accused of sucking his victims’ blood five years before Bram Stoker’s fictional villain was even born; peek into the cage of the original Prison Demon; and witness the daring escape of John Hunt Morgan’s band of Confederate prisoners.

A 25th anniversary history and celebration of The Shawshank Redemption, one of the most cherished American films of the late twentieth century and one of the finest movies made from a Stephen King story. The movie not only boasts a great story, it has a great backstory, starting with the dollar deal that eventually led King and co-stars Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman to put their trust in a largely untested director making his first feature film. Although the film received mostly positive reviews on its release in September 1994, the box office was disappointing and it failed to win many awards. But as Andy tells Red in the film, “no good thing ever dies.” The movie found new life, reaching an ever-growing audience on cable and home video (through word of mouth, it became one of the top-rented movies of 1995). Each year, The Shawshank Redemption rises in polls asking film fans to name their favorite movies. It has become nothing less than this generation’s The Grapes of Wrath, an inspiring story about keeping hope alive in bleak times and under the most horrendous conditions.

This book features an in-depth analysis of the world’s most popular movie, The Shawshank Redemption, delving into issues such as: the significance of race in the film, its cinematic debt to earlier genres, the gothic influences at work in the movie, and the representation of Andy’s poster art as cross-gendered signifiers. In addition to exploring the film and novella from which it was adapted, this book also traces the history of the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, which served as the film’s central location, and its relationship to the movie’s fictional Shawshank Prison. The last chapter examines why this film has remained both a popular and critical success, inspiring diverse fan bases on the Internet and the evolution of the Shawshank Trail, fourteen of the film’s actual site locations that have become a major tourist attraction in central Ohio.

With the opening of the Ohio State Reformatory in 1896, the state legislature had put in place "the most complete prison system, in theory, which exists in the United States." The reformatory joined the Ohio Penitentiary and the Boys Industrial School, also central-Ohio institutions, to form the first instance of "graded prisons; with the reform farm on one side of the new prison, for juvenile offenders, and the penitentiary on the other, for all the more hardened and incorrigible class." However, even as the concept was being replicated throughout the country, the staffs of the institutions were faced with the day-to-day struggle of actually making the system work.

SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE It was the worst two-week killing spree in Ohio's history. On the night of July 21, 1948, Robert Daniels and John West entered John and Nolena Niebel's house with loaded guns. They forced the family including the Niebel's 21-year-old daughter, Phyllis, into their car and drove them to a cornfield just off Fleming Falls Road in Mansfield. The two men instructed the Niebels to remove all of their clothing, and then Robert Daniels shot each of them in the head. The brutal murders caught national attention in the media, but the killing spree didn't stop there. Three more innocent people would lose their lives at the hands of Daniels and West in the coming week. Scott Fields tirelessly researched the killings, the capture and trial of Daniels and even interviewed a surviving member of the Niebel family to weave this tragic story into a must-read novel bringing the reader back to those dark days in the summer of 1948. What led to these brutal killings, and why was the Niebel family singled-out to be savagely murdered? It has been more than sixty years since the tragedy, and, yet, this question still remains unanswered. The killing spree is not only remembered to this day, but is an important and dark part of Mansfield lore.