Stateville Correctional Center

You're in your cell 24/7.

Now look, I, I, now the, the thing about it, you know how people usually don't want cellies? In Stateville, that's somewhere you want a cellie because you need somebody to talk to in that bitch, you know what I'm saying? So I had a cellie for like two, three days.

It was a nigga downstairs.

It was a nigga downstairs, 'cause like how the shit is, it's first gallery, second gallery, third gallery.

And that is what it's known as today when it functions as a tourist attraction.

Before we begin, I want to clarify that this is not Stateville, which is a different state prison located in Joliet.

Stateville was built in 1925, and it's famous for having a circular panopticon cell block where a central guard tower could theoretically keep an eye on all the prisoners at once.

The Joliet prison, rather, looks like a sandstone castle, complete with crenellated turrets.

It's appeared in many TV shows and movies over the years, including Prison Break on Fox, and perhaps most famously, it's where Elwood picks up his brother Jake at the start of The Blues Brothers.

You had later, of course, Leopold and Loeb is a big one.

The thrill killing of Bobby Franks in the 1920s.

And right as Stateville was being constructed, they were housed here.

Another brother turned out to be a fireman.

Another brother turned out to be a guard at Stateville Prison.

One brother was a Marine, two others, so mailman.

We productive.

Clemency was refused, and in the first days of May, 1994, he lost one last bid to stop the execution.

On May 10th, 1994, John Wayne Gacy died by lethal injection at the Stateville Correctional Center.

Crowds gathered outside the prison through the night, some of them celebrating, some of them there to protest the execution itself.

His last meal was fried chicken, shrimp, fries, and strawberries.

So even after decades behind bars, William Herons has never stopped claiming that he was innocent.

He started out at Stateville, which is a maximum security prison.

And then I guess he figured out like a way to get himself transferred to the psychiatric unit at Menard, which was supposedly like a little less strict.

So according to reports, he staged a little performance to make himself look quote unquote crazy.

And I was like, that's not crazy.

I can show you crazy.

But it seemed to work and he got transferred and he spent like the next five years at Menard before being sent back to Stateville.

In 1949, he filed a petition to win a hearing to re-examine the evidence.

Yeah, I mean, this stuff derived from, I mean, I mentioned Bentham because he really was monstrous in his banality.

You know, he, the panopticon, the literal structure of which, until the last few years when they closed down Stateville Prison, that was, you know, the Stateville had what they called the Roundhouse, you know, and in the days before people could be monitored remotely, the idea was from a central location, a guard or observer could, you know, view the entirety of the prisoner population, you know, simply by casting his gaze, you know, over the 360 degrees within his field of vision from that central location.

Bentham devised that, you know, and this was a wonderful thing in Bentham's view because The way that people can be made to behave morally is if they know they could be under surveillance at any time.

And that externalizes the conscience and that this is just a great thing.

And that's a key psychopathic trait, the failure to take responsibility for their own actions.

Despite numerous attempts to appeal his death sentence, on the 10th of May, 1994, John Wayne Gacy was executed by lethal injection at Stateville Penitentiary in Illinois.

It was a circus.

We were in a room at some point, and we saw a television screen, and we saw thousands of people lined up at least a mile down the street at the prison with signs, kill the clown, kill Gacy, with our names on it, kill Karen Conte.