Odd Prisoner Relics Discovered At Joliet Prison Cleanup

JOLIET, IL - Ordinarily, you can find economic development director Steve Jones at Joliet's City Hall in a suit and tie behind a desk. On Saturday, he wore blue jeans that were caked with black grime. He was digging through piles of old documents in one of the roofless buildings at the Old Joliet Prison. This particular building was ravaged by one of the slew of arson fires that occurred over the past few years. On Saturday, Jones was in search of a buried treasure of sorts. He was seeking to find long lost artifacts that belonged to the famous prison institution that sat abandoned for 15 years.

Sure enough, he found several prisoner intake cards that dated back to around 1920. Just a few feet away, while Patch was interviewing Jones, a laminated prisoner inmate card surfaced. Every item is a piece of history documenting one of the country's most well-known penal institutions, a place that once housed John Gacy, Richard Speck, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb.

"What we're trying to do is just isolate some of the things that might some have historical value," Jones said. "Who knows, we might find some interesting prisoner names in here. It was funny because my first day of doing this I found someone named Speck, but it wasn't Richard Speck, so I got the museum folks all excited by telling them that, 'Hey I found the Speck,' it was like Joe Speck or whatever. You stick your hands out here, you never know what you're going to find."

The city has teamed up with the Joliet Area Historical Museum to make the Joliet landmark into a popular world-wide tourist draw. The museum hopes to start offering tours of the prison grounds starting over the summer, provided that the massive cleanup remains a success.

Joliet Mayor Bob O'Dekirk was also helping with Saturday's first-ever community-wide volunteer days. The volunteer began on Saturday with two three-hour shifts and it will take place again Sunday.

"It's just another chapter in the cleanup," O'Dekirk told Joliet Patch. "It's going to be going on all day today and all day tomorrow. And everybody who comes through has the same impression. They're really happy that the city stepped up, and we're doing this. It's going to be a really good thing for Joliet and I think you can see the excitement building with the trades, with the city workers and now just opening it up to the general public to people that want to come in here and help."

Playing a big role in this weekend's cleanup were members of the Will County Historical Research and Recovery Association. About 40 members of the group including several of the original members of the club, helped spearhead the effort to walk the grounds. They found some bullet casings and other interesting items in the ground. One object was "an enforcing tool," one of the members remarked.

The following are several photos, plus a few short videos chronicling Saturday's first-ever Joliet community volunteer cleanup inside the prison.

Images, videos via John Ferak/Joliet Patch Editor