Joliet Correctional Center
closed prison in Joliet, Illinois
Joliet Correctional Center (originally known as Illinois State Penitentiary, colloquially as Joliet Prison, Joliet Penitentiary, the Old Joliet Prison, and the Collins Street Prison) is a former prison in Joliet, Illinois, United States, which operated from 1858 to 2002.
Numerous films and television productions have used the prison as a setting or filming location. In the 1980 film The Blues Brothers, character Jake Blues is released from the prison at the beginning of the movie (hence his nickname "Joliet Jake"). Footage of the prison is used for the exterior shots for the Illinois "state prison" in the 1949 film White Heat, and for the location of the first and second season of the series Prison Break, and the 2006 film Let's Go to Prison.
In 2018, the decommissioned prison was opened to guided tours.
Operation
Joliet Correctional Center opened in 1858. The prison was built with convict labor leased by the state to contractor Lorenzo P. Sanger and warden Samuel K. Casey. The limestone used to build the prison was quarried on the site. The first 33 inmates arrived from Alton in May 1858 to begin construction; the last prisoners were transferred in July 1860. Both criminals and prisoners of war were confined there during the Civil War.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Joliet Correctional Center” is closed prison in Joliet, Illinois. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Joliet, Correctional and Center, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1702652. Authority coordinates are 41.547, -88.074. 1 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1858, 2002, 1980 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joliet Correctional Center” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.