The Nebraska State Penitentiary, Oldest in the State
Near Lincoln, Nebraska
The Nebraska State Penitentiary opened in eighteen sixty-nine, the same year the university was chartered and just two years after statehood. For half a century it was the only adult correctional facility in the state. Everything Nebraska did with convicted felons went through this one institution on the southeast side of Lincoln.
The original design followed the radial architecture common to American prisons of the late nineteenth century: cellblocks arranged to allow observation from a central point, the logic of the panopticon made into brick and iron. The facility expanded repeatedly as Nebraska's population grew, and the cellblocks constructed in the second half of the nineteenth century remained in use until nineteen eighty and nineteen eighty-one, when they were finally replaced by modular housing units.
The penitentiary has been the site of moments that reached beyond its walls. Nebraska used the death penalty here beginning in nineteen oh three. After decades of use and periods of abolition and reinstatement, Nebraska's voters reinstated capital punishment in twenty sixteen following a legislative ban the year before.
This track does not describe the events that occurred within the walls in detail, as the record of violence inside the institution is not something that belongs in a moving vehicle. What can be said is that the penitentiary is a significant part of Lincoln's institutional history, operating continuously since eighteen sixty-nine. The state has been planning a replacement facility, with construction of a new twelve hundred bed institution north of Lincoln awarded in twenty twenty-five, with expected completion in twenty twenty-eight. The original structure will be retired.
The Nebraska State Penitentiary sits just east of the center of the city, a reminder that the business of government has always included institutions that people prefer not to think about until they have to. It has been operating here, in one form or another, for more than one hundred fifty years.
