From the Sacramento Bee
MCNEIL ISLAND, Wash. — When the prison that eventually would become McNeil Island Corrections Complex opened more than 135 years ago, a tight-knit community of fishermen and loggers, brothel owners and bootleggers, and prison employees and their children developed around it.
As in any small town, everybody knew their neighbors’ business — even if their neighbors were serving 15 to life.
“It was a wonderful place to grow up,” recalls Tim Taylor, 60, of Longbranch, Wash.
The son of a corrections officer and a prison switchboard operator, Taylor spent his youth tramping through the island’s woods and swimming in the local reservoir. It was a lazy, easy life occasionally marred by sirens alerting residents that an inmate had escaped.
Read more at SacBee.com.