Miller’s baseball game in prison

FAIRFIELD - It was supposed to be just a baseball game (actually two), but it turned into something a lot scarier.

When Fairfield High School girls basketball Jeff Miller was just a lad, he spent some time in prison.

It's not like it sounds, however.

He was part of an American Legion team during his teenage years that played as many as 64 games in a season.

'We were very successful in baseball during my 17- and 18 year-old years,” Miller said.

His season as a 16 year-old had quite a start.

'When I made the cut for the Legion baseball team my 16-year-old year, the schedule just said we were playing Ft. Madison the first game,” Miller said. 'No one told us 16-year olds where exactly we were playing in Ft. Madison.”

That destination soon became clear.

'So we get to town and drive toward the prison and to my amazement, we pulled into the parking lot,” Miller said.

If there was still some doubt as to where they would be playing, it was cleared up by an order from the coach.

'Coach told us to get our gear and get going,” Miller said. 'We had to go through two different security checkpoints to get to the playing field. We warmed up and played a doubleheader. Those were interesting experiences.”

The doubleheader was against a team of inmates at the prison. Even in the course of the games, some frightening situations developed.

'All of their weight lifting equipment was back toward the wall between left field and center field,” Miller said. 'As luck would have it, there was a ball hit through the gap and I had to run around a lot of huge men making interesting comments to get the ball.”

The prison was established in 1839, one year after Iowa became a territory, and seven years before it became a state in 1846. Iowa State Penitentiary was patterned after the penitentiary in Auburn, New York. In 1982 the prison was remodeled, and unitization was introduced at ISP. The unitization divided the large cell blocks into smaller units that were easier to manage.

Before the abolition of capital punishment in Iowa, executions were performed at Fort Madison. The last execution in Iowa was at the prison in 1963.

In 1981 there was a riot that lasted about 11 hours. Eight newly hired employees at ISP were taken hostage and forced to trade clothes with the offenders In 2005, two inmates escaped, but both were eventually caught.

'when I was 17, we had just started the game when a really loud siren went off,” Miller said. 'All of the prisoners hit the deck immediately.”

Someone had tried to escape just as the first game got started and the prison went on an hourslong lockdown.

'We were stuck inside the prison for six hours,” Miller said.

Unfamiliar with prison protocol, of course, the players did not immediately dive to the ground at the sound of the siren.

'A prison guard came over to our bench and said for our own safety, we should all lay flat on the ground,” Miller said. 'So we did and we were on the ground for 20-25 minutes.”

During this time, the guards took all the prisoners back to their cells.

'After that, they told us we could get up,” Miller said.

Hoping that was the end of the fright, the players thought they would be going home with the prisoner team now locked up in their cells. But the warden had a strict rule about the prison being locked down for six hours, no exceptions. Not even an exception for a team of teenagers was granted.

'We had 15 players there, so we split up into five three-man teams and played a modified version of baseball for a couple of hours,” Miller said. 'We then held a regular practice. After that we just goofed around until they came and got us to go home.”

It sounds like a crazy unbelievable story and it was unbelievable, even to family members.

'It is kind of a funny side note (that) when I got home and told my parents, they didn't believe me,” Miller said. 'They only changed their minds when it was in the newspaper the next day.”

Miller does not have any pictures of himself playing sports because his house caught fire when he was in high school and his family lost everything.

The new Iowa State Penitentiary was completed in 2014, though some problems kept the new facility from opening on schedule, inmates were transferred from the old facility to the new on Aug. 1, 2015

In May, 2017 the former prison was opened for a one-time tour, with current and retired prison employees acting as guards. The prison still is owned by the state of Iowa, who pays about $1,000 a day to keep the lights on and the site secure. The city wants an environmental study to be done before prison ownership is transferred to a nonprofit organization.

Maybe it could be used to play baseball games with no sirens interrupting play.