F-House was round. Cells in tiers around the outside, one guard position in the middle, hundreds of men in a single open space.
It sat inside Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill, Illinois, a maximum-security prison that opened in 1925 and had four of those roundhouses. By the 1990s it was the last one in the country still holding prisoners.
By December 2016 Illinois had emptied it and avoided $10.3 million in deferred maintenance, then reopened it in 2020 for COVID-19 isolation…