The North II Cell House contains inmates in disciplinary segregation, administrative detention, and the general population.

Within the grounds are also the Inmate Dining Hall, Chapel, Health Care Unit, Receiving and Classification Unit, Education Building, Maintenance and Telecommunications Departments, Menard Division of Illinois Correctional Industries, and Randolph Hall, which acts as Menard's training complex for prison employees.

[4] The current industries at Menard include meat processing, knitting and sewing, manufacturing of floor care and cleaning products, waste removal, and recycling operations.

Of the inmates housed at Menard, 51% are incarcerated for murder, 21% have life sentences, and 33% are serving more than 20 years.

[5] The state's other electrocutions were carried out at the Stateville Correctional Center in Crest Hill and at the Cook County Jail in Chicago.

Reformer Dorothea Dix visited the site and was sharply critical of the filthy conditions there in an 1847 address to the Illinois General Assembly.

She noted, among many other things, that Alton was the only prison in the U.S. where inmates were made to stand while eating meals.

[5] The rear wall runs over the top of a hill that was one of the prison's rock quarries.

The exterior includes columns, an awning portraying skeleton keys and a scale of justice.

Christie Thompson and Joe Shapiro of The Marshall Project wrote that the exterior "looks more like an ornate university building than a maximum-security facility.

These cages, which housed two men each, had a center wall of steel with the top and sides consisting of iron bars.

[4] By 1931, the farm grew to 1,500 acres (6.1 km2) and brick manufacturing and the machine shop were added to the prison's major industries.

The disciplinary staff, consisting of the warden and his deputies, decided on promotions and demotions in grade levels.

The prison commissary, around 1930, allowed inmates to buy tobacco, candy, toilet articles, canned goods, and fruit.

[4] In late October 1952, Menard experienced a prison riot, while Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson was campaigning for president as the Democratic Party nominee.

In May 1974, sixty inmates held four guards hostage, this time demanding congregation rights in the prison yard and several changes in administrative procedures.

[1] In March 1994, Menard was in the news when 24-year-old Michael Blucker took the state to court after contracting HIV while in the prison.

Blucker stated that prison staff helped gang members rape him.

Although the juries found the staff not to be liable, the case uncovered problems of sexual assault and gang activities within the prison.

Around 2004, 28-year-old Corey Fox, who was serving a life sentence for murder, killed 22-year-old Joshua Daczewitz, a person from a Chicago suburb who was convicted of arson and robbery.

On November 29, 2014, David Sesson killed Bernard Simmons; the two were also placed in a solitary confinement cell together.

[7] In the 1993 movie The Fugitive, Dr. Richard Kimble (played by Harrison Ford) is sent to the prison at Menard to await execution, but escapes following a bus-train collision en route.