On the inside

By Ellen Creager/Detroit Free Press

JACKSON, Mich. - There's new glamour in the slammer.

Tours are booming for Michigan's most famous lockup city, with visitors coming from across the state and beyond to go on the Jackson Historic Prison Tour.

Its highlight: the infamous 7-Block at the former State Prison of Southern Michigan. It closed in 2007.

The eerie 7-Block, still part of a razor-wire enclosed campus with four other active prisons, echoes with drama. It's where Dr. Jack Kevorkian stayed when he first arrived - cell 82, level three - and where hundreds of men, women and children were held on a single night during the 1967 Detroit riot.

Visitors can sit in the creepy cells, smell the dank air, read the blue-cover prison rule books still attached to the cell bars and imagine life for the 515 prisoners held there.

One thing visitors can't do? Take pictures. To see 7-Block, you have to come in person.

Judy Gail Krasnow, the tour founder who worked with the state to add 7-Block as part of her historical prison tour last year, said Jackson's prisons are a potential tourism gold mine.

Her tour garnered just 400 tourists in 2008 but 3,200 last year. This year, “we already have almost 50 tours booked.”

Like California's Alcatraz, Jackson has endless prison stories just waiting to be told.

“I want to raise the spirit of Jackson's prison past,” Krasnow says. “It's not an embarrassment. It's history.”

In the stark symmetry of the prison building known as 7-Block, it's easy to imagine bad things happening.

Rails are garish yellow. Bars are white. The floor is grim gray. There are windows, but the light is filtered, like at a cheap motel, so you can't see out. You go through a door into the yard; looped razor wire menaces from atop every fence.

Nobody would ever want to come here.

Except as a tourist, of course.

“I loved it. I loved the way it looked like the prisons you see on TV, but you can see it in person,” says Jan Herrick of Kalamazoo, Mich. “For some reason, prisons really fascinate me.”

They fascinate others, too. From West Virginia to California, prison tours are drawing crowds.

Since the Jackson Historic Prison Tour added the visit to 7-Block at the former State Prison of Southern Michigan last year, interest has spiked, said Judy Gail Krasnow, tour founder.

“People like to see the real thing. A lot of the fascination is, ‘There but for the grace of God go I.'”

That said, the four-and-a-half-hour tour has to be one of the strangest prison tours - and one of the strangest tours, period - in the world.

You see two prisons, two art studios and the tour guide's apartment.

There are odd juxtapositions - you eat a turkey sandwich, visit a painter in his bright studio, then go to the basement to see 19th-century, solitary-confinement cells.

You take a bus 2 miles north to Blackman Township's prison complex and see 7-Block, which looks ancient but actually was in use until five years ago. Krasnow interviewed former Warden Charles Anderson and former inmates to learn the cellblock's inside stories.

If you go

The Jackson Historic Prison Tour runs through Oct. 31 and takes participants to Michigan's First State Prison (1838-1934), now the Armory Arts Village, and 7-Block (1934-2007) at the former State Prison of Southern Michigan.

Tours last three and a half to four and a half hours, depending on the itinerary, and are by appointment only. The minimum group size is four, and no child younger than 9 will be allowed.

Tickets are $35 per person; groups of 20 or more can get discounts and a package price that includes lunch.

For more information, go to www.historicprisontours.com or call (517) 795-2112.

Spots where you can do more hard time on the prison tour circuit

By Ellen Creager/Detroit Free Press

Doing time on the prison tour circuit? Here are some other tours you won't want to miss.

• Alcatraz, Calif.: The legendary island in San Francisco Bay was a federal penitentiary from 1934 to 1963; daily tours are run by the National Park Service. For more information, go to www.nps.gov/Alcatraz or www.alcatrazcruises.com or call (415) 981-7625.
•  Eastern State Penitentiary, Philadelphia: Count Al Capone among the inmates of this prison that operated 1829 to 1971; daily tours are so extensive they even have a virtual one online. For more information, go to www.easternstate.org or call (215) 236-3300.
•  Ohio State Reformatory, Mansfield: This spooky state prison operated 1886 to 1990 and was the location of the filming of “The Shawshank Redemption” in 1994. Daily tours are offered. For more information, go to www.mrps.org or call (419) 522-2644.
•  Andersonville Prison, Andersonville, Ga.: The Confederate military prison housed more than 45,000 Union soldiers in its short existence, and thousands of them died there. If offers self-guided tours, part of a National Park Service historic site. For more information, go to www.nps.gov/ande, or call (229) 924-0343.
• West Virginia State Penitentiary, Moundsville, W. Va.: This prison operated from 1876 to 1995; it runs daily tours and even holds mock prison riots. For more information, go to www.wvpentours.com or call (304) 845-6529.