This elevation drawing of a prison was made by Thomas Ustick Walter, the architect who designed the U.S. Capitol dome. ( Library of Congress )
Leavenworth is a city of prisons.
The area is home to five separate facilities, including a federal penitentiary, a state prison, and the U.S. military’s only maximum security prison. The imposing federal pen once housed Machine Gun Kelly and Robert Stroud , the “Birdman of Alcatraz,” who did most of his research on birds in Kansas, not on the California prison island…