From The Vault Of Art Shay: Behind Bars

By Art Shay in News on Aug 8, 2013 7:00PM

Jimmy Hoffa

One of the more humane jails in Illinois, 1974

The most famous French prisoner ever, Jean Genet, right, who died at 75, was such a prolific writer that he wrote such plays as The Maids,The Balcony and The Screens, all produced on Broadway and in other theater capitals. His classic novels, The Thief's Journal; and Our Lady of the Flowers and The Blacks, were made into movies. David Bowie who loved and admired Genet wrote a hit song about him in 1952-and writer Jean Cocteau got his life prison sentence commuted by the President of France.

Nelson Algren tries to wake up an imprisoned friend at the police HQ lockup at 11th and State Streets in 1949.

This was the youngest male on record to be committed of a major crime in the United States, at the time, in the 70s. He was 14.

Jail time is often lonely time.

A lawyer presents a judge at Cook County Circuit Court a brief designed to keep his client out of jail.

(Legendary Chicago-based photographer Art Shay has taken photos of kings, queens, celebrities and the common man in a 60-year career. This week, Art goes behind bars with some stunning photography.)

The specter of going to prison hangs over all of us. Our comedians joke about going to jail for tax evasion. Our politician comedians, governors and all, take their fulfilled fears with them and presumably use them on their captive audiences. Every week a murderer or a sinner whose crimes pissed off the populace or the slavering prosecutors of what passes for journalistic indignation—ah, there Rush Limbaugh, trying to stay off his addictive pills—passes through the steel portals of a personal and public hell to wash him or herself of sin. Somebody jokes that the only non-quarterback Manning may get 136 years for distributing free national secrets.

My favorite prisoner was my old friend Jimmy Hoffa. Not friend, acquaintance. He was a great, likable, camera subject always, and he once beat me at one-wall handball in his then-prison. The picture that Life and now Chicagoist displays is one that shows him in the holding cage at Lewisburg, Penn. prison with his topcoat futilely covering his handcuffs. He'd be released through this same gate after serving 58 months of a 13-year sentence for attempted bribery, jury tampering and fraud. A President who barely stayed out of jail himself, Richard Nixon, apparently traded Jimmy a few years of freedom and resignation as president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters for his apparent influence in the Brotherhood's voting habits.