Полная история старой тюрьмы Монтаны — бунт 1959 года, который закончился в «Башне смерти»

The Old Montana State Prison opened in 1871 with nine men locked in six-by-eight-foot stone cells with no heat, no plumbing, and no wall around the property. Within a month it was overcrowded. Within a decade the state couldn't afford to run it. Then came Frank Conley. Starting in 1893, the 300-pound warden put his inmates to work quarrying sandstone by hand and building the fortress that still dominates the south end of Deer Lodge's Main Street. Twenty-four-foot walls buried four feet underground. Six guard towers. A 200-cell block completed in eleven months. The first theater ever built inside prison walls in America. Conley ran the prison and served as mayor of Deer Lodge for 31 consecutive years before being removed for corruption in 1921. After Conley, the prison rotted. Political wardens with no corrections experience. Inmates locked down 22 hours a day. Guards earning less than gas station attendants. A "con-boss" system where privileged inmates ran the daily operations. In 1957, a national corrections expert inspected the facility and called conditions "appalling and potentially explosive." He was right. On April 16, 1959, career convict Jerry Myles and 19-year-old accomplice Lee Smart threw gasoline in a guard's face, seized rifles from the catwalk, and shot Deputy Warden Ted Rothe dead at his desk. Over the next 36 hours, they held roughly two dozen hostages under jugs of laundry naphtha wired to burn, demanded press access, and dared the National Guard to come in. At 4:45 a.m. on April 18, Sergeant Bill Rose fired a World War II bazooka at the northwest tower of Cell House 1. The hostages were freed. At the top of the tower, guards found both ringleaders dead from a murder-suicide. This video covers the complete history, from the 1871 founding through the convict-built fortress, decades of neglect, the three-act siege, and the prison's final closure in 1979. The tower still stands. The bazooka scars are still visible. 🔔 Subscribe for more stories from America's forgotten prisons, abandoned cellblocks, and carceral history. 📍 VISIT Old Montana Prison Museum 1106 Main Street, Deer Lodge, Montana https://www.pcmaf.org/ Open year-round. Self-guided tours, historical dusk tours, and October ghost tours. One ticket covers five museums on the prison grounds. 📚 REFERENCES & FURTHER READING Kevin S. Giles, "Jerry's Riot: The True Story of Montana's 1959 Prison Disturbance" (the definitive account, based on 10 years of research and eyewitness interviews): https://www.amazon.com/Jerrys-Riot-Mo... Keith Edgerton, "Montana Justice: Power, Punishment, and the Penitentiary" (University of Washington Press, 2004): https://uwapress.uw.edu/book/97802959... Ellen Baumler with photographs by J.M. Cooper, "Dark Spaces: Montana's Historic Penitentiary at Deer Lodge" (University of New Mexico Press, 2008): https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Spaces-Mo... Old Montana Prison Museum (Powell County Museum & Arts Foundation): https://www.pcmaf.org/ Montana State Prison historical records (Archives West, Montana Historical Society): https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org... Legends of America, "Old Prison Museum in Deer Lodge, Montana": https://www.legendsofamerica.com/mt-p... State v. Alton, 139 Mont. 387 (1961), Montana Supreme Court (primary legal record of the riot timeline) Kevin S. Giles, author site and additional riot research: https://kevinsgiles.com/prison-riot/ #OldMontanaPrison #DeerLodge #PrisonHistory #1959Riot #DeathTower #JerryMyles #FrankConley #AbandonedPrisons #CriminalJustice #Documentary #MontanaHistory #SolitaryRedemption #PrisonRiot #TrueCrime #AmericanHistory