The Big House

An inside-the-walls look at the bloody story of Folsom Prison, which opened in 1880, experiencing the first of many escapes the same year. Designed for habitual felons and incorrigibles doing hard time, its violent history includes 93 hangings.

Upon opening in rural New York State, Attica was hailed as an architectural landmark and model for the confinement of the most dangerous criminals.

McNeil Island, an isolated fortress rising from Puget Sound's chilly waters 40 miles south of Seattle, has been the scene of daring escapes and intense violence and home to train robbers, gangsters, and even politicians.

Most of Angola's 5,000 maximum-security inmates will never see the outside world again. Formerly a slave plantation in a remote area of Louisiana, in the 1930s Angola remained backward and brutal and by 1975.