Except for a brief interval during the early 1880s—when he, along with the other inmates, were temporarily transferred to another institution while Charlestown underwent renovations—he would remain immured within its grim, granite walls until 1929: a period of fifty-three years, extending from the time of “Custer’s Last Stand” to the start of the Great Depression. And of that half century of internment, he would spend forty-one years in solitary confinement—the second-longest such stretch in U.S. penal history (surpassed only by the forty-two years in “deep lock” endured by Robert F. Stroud, the so-called “Birdman of Alcatraz”).Though he would eventually be transferred to a somewhat larger space, Jesse passed the first decade of his sentence in what was little more than a sealed, granite vault—a seven-by-nine-foot cell with a few narrow loopholes high in the walls to provide a modicum of light and ventilation. His only furnishings were a little table, a narrow bunk, a metal wash pail, and a wooden slop bucket.
