Central Ohio's Historic Prisons Charley Harper JOHN CLEVES SYMMES

JOHN CLEVES SYMMES

The WPA in Cleveland

MARCH - APRIL 1998

SIGNS OF SPRING

with eight national championships and counting

Central Ohio's Historic Prisons Charley Harper JOHN CLEVES SYMMESWith the opening of the Ohio State Reformatory in 1896, the state legislature had put in place the most complete prison system, in theory, which exists in the United States. The reformatory joined the Ohio Penitentiary and the Boys Industrial School, also central Ohio institutions, to form the first instance of graded prisons; with the reform farm on one side of the new prison, for juvenile offenders, and the penitentiary on the other, for all the