The summer of 2019 I’d heard the high rise prison in Burke County, NC was slated to be demolished. I had a connection that was able to secure a private tour of the place not long before it was imploded.
I invited another photographer along for the adventure and we met with one of the prison key holders that gave us a 3 hour tour of all 16 floors. It was incredibly humid inside, so we got a real feel for what the prisoners experienced on days the AC was cut as punishment when they got too rowdy.
The stairwells and hallways were littered with dead birds and dummy bullets from the Swat Team using it for practice after its door’s closed.
On average, it housed 800 inmates, making it one of the largest prisons in the state. Designated as a youth facility, the first inmates arrived on May 1, 1972. Inmates were classified to the upper floors and worked their way down by behavior. Even the food quality improved. E.g., the 16th floor was maximum security, the 15th was the hospital and school, so you had to be on floor 14 before you saw run-of-the-mill inmates. In 1973 the Green Berets were brought in to help rehabilitate the inmates and teach them by example how to do things like make their beds, shine their shoes, and good behavior was rewarded by making them “Lieutenant” for the day.
One of the retired correctional officers is quoted as saying, “I had one boy when I was working in the canteen. He was in for a murder charge. He had killed his daddy. We worked with him and all the indications were there that there had been some parent abuse in the deal. Over a length of time, it took three or four years, we finally got his parole because we found out that his daddy was abusing the whole family. It makes you feel good to see where they got the truth in the whole deal.”
The prison struggled with full funding and staffing from the beginning, leading to sometimes unsafe conditions for the guards. In 1972, a guard was severely beaten when he was assigned to manage both the 13th and 14th floor by himself. About midnight, a group of inmates who had been allowed out of their cells past the 11 PM lock-up to watch TV, lured officer Ledford to the mop room. The officer was beaten with a mop handle in the belief that he had the keys to the fire escape. He did not, as the first escape doors are controlled from the first floor control room. He suffered severe injuries, but might have been more seriously hurt had an inmate on the floor not summoned help. At the time, a total of 55 officers managed the high-rise prison, although 98 custody officers had been requested to man the facility.
Because of an uptick in prison population across the state in the early 90’s, the prison was maxed out. There were 503 cells in the building (10 regular housing floors with 46 single man cells each, the infirmary on the 15th floor had 10 medical cells and the 16th floor segregation unit had 33 cells). More than 650 inmates were squeezed into the prison much of the time during those years. Later, several inmates made a brazen attempt to escape, but were quickly captured (our tour included the spot where they slipped out.) I know several people that worked as guards there that all swear one of the floors was haunted. The building would sway in strong winds, the plumbing was antiquated and couldn’t be reasonably replaced, and it was overcrowded. The facility closed in 2013 and was imploded in July 2020.
