As More Prisons Shutter, Governments Wonder What to Do With Them

From the moment he saw Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, Pete Waddington wanted to turn the shuttered prison deep in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee into a tourist destination. It hasn’t been easy. The effort started four years ago when Waddington, a businessman from Chattanooga, rode his motorcycle on a wooded route nicknamed the Devil’s Triangle. The path took him through dense forest to a clearing where several flagpoles stood next to a closed prison gate. The prison, Waddington later learned, was considered so remote, the chances of escape so daunting, the prisoners’ crimes so serious, that state officials called Brushy Mountain “the end of the line.”