A new documentary about the oldest prison west of the Mississippi River will have its TV premiere at 8 p.m. Sunday on WQPT, the Quad-Cities PBS station.
Humanities Iowa partnered with Washington, D.C.-based filmmaker Dan Manatt on the hourlong film, “The Fort: 177 Years of Crime & Punishment at the Iowa State Penitentiary,” which had its theatrical premiere in Fort Madison, 96 miles south of Davenport on the Mississippi River, last October and is now available on DVD.
The Iowa State Penitentiary, nicknamed “The Fort,” was founded in 1839. At the time of its closing in 2015, it was the oldest prison west of the Mississippi River. It was replaced by a new $175 million, 800-bed prison north of Fort Madison.
“The documentary focuses on two aspects — its history, and the transition from the old penitentiary to the new — how inmates and the staff dealt with that,” Mr. Manatt, 49, said this week, noting production concluded with an August 2016 visit to the new facility. A little more than 500 inmates were moved in Aug. 1, 2015, he said.
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The film’s interviewees include Jack Nutter, who entered the prison in 1956 when he was only 18 and is one of the longest-serving inmates in the country; Nick Ludwick, the warden from 2010 to 2017; and Edward Love, who works in the prison’s hospice program, among others. The hospice program is one of the first of its kind in the U.S.
Mr. Nutter is the fifth-longest-serving offender in the U.S. and the longest-serving in Iowa history. He’s serving a life sentence for killing an Independence, Iowa, police officer in 1956.
He originally was sentenced to death by hanging, but his sentence was changed to life in prison by then-Gov. Robert Ray, and in 1965, the Iowa Legislature abolished the death penalty in the state.
Victor Feguer was the last inmate executed by hanging at the Fort — of 46 total — in March 1963, after murdering a doctor, Mr. Manatt said.The documentary does have some images of executions, but nothing gruesome, he noted.
“There is serious dialogue and has been legislation introduced to reinstate the death penalty,” he said, noting Iowa has been a national leader in criminal-justice reform for much of its history.
Clips of the interview with Mr. Nutter are spread throughout the film, and at on point, during a discussion of the large number of lifers at the prison, he said: “If they had let me out soon after, I would have never done anything wrong again.”
Another offender serving a life sentence, Edward Love, said, “If judges spent six months behind these bars, behind these walls, before they sit on that bench, they would think twice about how much time they give a person.”
Mr. Manatt has been a documentary filmmaker for 10 years. His previous films include “The Republic of Baseball: The First MLB Superstars and Civil Rights Heroes” and “Whiskey Cookers: The True History of the Templeton Rye Bootleggers,” which won Best Documentary at the Iowa Independent Film Festival in 2014 and was shown on WQPT in 2016.
Humanities Iowa hired him to write and direct “The Fort,” he said, noting the agency provided a grant for “Whiskey Cookers.”
“The real credit for the film belongs to Humanities Iowa and (executive director) Chris Rossi,” Mr. Manatt said.
October’s premiere of the documentary coincided with semi-regular public tours of the old prison. The next round of tours will take place April 14-15, Mr. Manatt said.
“The tours are part of a fundraising effort to have a historic-preservation study done to turn it into some sort of tourist attraction,” he said of the 1839 prison.
For more information, visit thefort.film.
