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“Male convicts from all the services sentenced to punitive discharge and incarceration longer than 7 years are confined at the third-tier – the maximum-security U. S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. The Portsmouth Naval Prison, built to be a modern correctional facility for a navy which had once disciplined by flogging and capital punishment, was rendered obsolete. After containing about 86,000 military inmates over its 66-year operation, the brig closed in 1974, its maintenance thereafter contributing to shipyard overhead. The Navy briefly used the prison in the early 1980s to train military corrections officers. Volunteer Inmates from the Rockingham County Jail were sometimes used. “

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Naval_Prison#In_popular_culture

Damn.

They closed the most brutal, and bleak prison in the military system.

Funny. When I went on the USS JFK for the first time, I wanted to walk around and explore the ship, so I went everywhere that I could where passage appeared to be unrestrained.

I walked down a ladder, and I stopped at the bottom, realizing it was not a passageway, but instead a large compartment I had descended into, but...it was odd.

There was a guy standing perfectly still facing a steel beam with his nose nearly touching it.

I shifted my view, and saw another sailor doing the same thing facing a bulkhead.

And there were a few sailors sitting on the deck, not talking or moving, and looking straight ahead.

This was bizarre.

Then I looked up and saw a Marine standing there right in front of me in the short sleeve khaki shirt and blue slacks with red stripe that they wore in those days aboard ship, and he wordlessly shook his head side to side and pointed back up the ladder.

Light dawns on Marblehead. I had strayed down into the Brig...:)

I recall we used to refer to any brig or prison where Marines ran the show as “a prison where there are “men with shiny shoes” and “you don’t want to go there” to new guys.

I used to drive near the Portsmouth Naval Prison fairly often where I could see it, and it was hard to see it without thinking of all the men who had spent time in it over the years, some deserving, some perhaps not, but all ruled by hard-ass Marines.