Lebanon Correctional Institution

Lebanon Correctional Institution enters the narrative first as a looming return and then as the setting of a long, sharply changing period of confinement. For William Stanley Milligan, its significance lies not only in the sentence served there, but in the way prison custody repeatedly intersects with the book’s account of his shifting personalities, access to treatment, artistic work, and prospects for release.

A Prison in the Legal Shadow

After police discovered weapons at Milligan’s home during his arrest, the Adult Parole Authority issued an Order to Hold. It directed that he remain in custody pending a preliminary hearing on a parole violation at Franklin County Jail; revocation could send him immediately back to Lebanon, near Cincinnati, to await trial. The institution was therefore a concrete possibility before it became the destination of the later transfer: the parole process could return Milligan to a place he already knew.

When a court agreed to delay proceedings so that a psychologist could examine him, Gary Schweickart turned to the Adult Parole Authority’s on-site hearing. Milligan anticipated the outcome as a return to Lebanon, while Gary’s response made clear that his defenders would try to prevent it. Their legal work involved a separate compromise over psychological interviews: prosecutors agreed that they would question Milligan about incriminating statements to court-appointed psychologists only if he testified in his own defense. The public defenders accepted the risk and allowed Southwest’s forensic psychiatric unit to interview him on those terms. Lebanon thus stands in the background of a case in which custody and psychiatric evaluation were closely entangled.

The discussions surrounding that evaluation also brought forward details of Milligan’s internal history. When Gary learned that one personality had been absent for seven years, he reacted with disbelief. The disclosure does not describe prison life, but it helps establish the psychological questions being raised while the possibility of confinement at Lebanon remained immediate. Another feared destination was Lima State Hospital: Gary believed Judge Jay Flowers might send Milligan there and recalled Ragen’s stated fear of what would happen if that transfer occurred. In this legal landscape, Lebanon represented a known prison to which Milligan could be returned, while Lima represented a different and particularly dreaded institutional future.

Arrival and the Transfer of Control

The narrative later places Allen on a prison transport after forty-five days at Mansfield Reformatory. On June 9, he was handcuffed in pairs with fifty-nine other inmates aboard a blue Ohio State Reformatory bus bound for Lebanon. The journey brought confinement into view as a physical arrangement: an armed guard sat behind a cage at the front of the bus, and the prison’s barbed-wire fence and watchtowers marked the approach. Allen’s thought was directed toward the sentence ahead and whether he could survive two years there.

At the receiving entrance, the narration shifts to Ragen. As the second door opened, he understood the change in the internal balance of power as well as the change of institution: Arthur no longer dominated, and Ragen expected to decide who would come on and off The spot during the coming years. The iron door closing behind the prisoners marks the literal threshold, while Ragen’s confidence in his own authority gives that threshold an inward counterpart. Lebanon is presented as a place where external custody and internal control occupy the same stretch of time, without the book treating the two as identical.

Ragen found Lebanon an improvement over Mansfield Reformatory, describing it as newer, cleaner, and brighter. At the first-day orientation he listened to the rules and regulations and to descriptions of the prison’s schools and jobs. This initial assessment complicates the prison’s threatening approach: the fences and towers define its security, but inside, the institution also offers an organized routine and work opportunities. That contrast does not erase the fact of incarceration; it gives the prison a daily structure against which later restrictions and efforts to leave become legible.

Isolation, Medical Care, and Restricted Possessions

The routine changed after a cocaine episode. On October 4, Milligan was moved to C block and placed in protective isolation. His medical books and portable television were taken away. Ragen tore steel bed rails from the wall and wedged them into the cell door, which workmen had to remove to get him out. The incident records both the material limits imposed by segregation and a forceful response to being confined there; the resulting damage also required staff to intervene physically in the cell’s arrangement.

Milligan subsequently had difficulty sleeping and complained of vomiting and blurred vision. Dr. Steinberg saw him from time to time and gave him mild sedatives and antispasmodics. Although the doctor considered the problems essentially psychological, he ordered Milligan’s transfer from Lebanon to Central Medical Center, Columbus, on October 13. The sequence makes medical care part of the prison’s history without suggesting that the institution itself could resolve the underlying condition: symptoms were observed in custody, treatment was attempted there, and the doctor then directed a move to a medical facility.

The account later measures the isolation in months. In August, after eleven months in protective isolation and shifts back and forth from the psychiatric range, Milligan was told he could return to the prison population. Warden Dallman proposed work he considered not very dangerous and pointed to the pencil sketches covering the cell wall, suggesting a place for Milligan in Bob Reinert’s art class. The offer followed a period in which books and television had been removed, and it connected a visible activity Milligan had sustained in isolation to a possible role within the wider prison population.

Art, Parole, and Departure

Before that return, the prospect of parole had already shaped Milligan’s conduct. By March 1976, Allen hoped to be released in June, but the parole board postponed the hearing for two months, making him anxious. He had heard through the prison grapevine that paying the clerk who filed an application might secure parole. The account does not present this rumor as an established practice; it shows how uncertainty about the process entered prison talk and prompted Allen to look for ways to accumulate things that could be traded.

He sketched in pencil and charcoal and sold the drawings to inmates and guards in exchange for items he could stockpile. He also wrote to Marlene asking her to bring oranges injected with vodka, one for Ragen and the others intended for sale. The sketches, ordinarily a means of artistic work, became part of an informal economy, while the request for oranges shows how outside contact could be drawn into that economy. These actions belong to the same practical effort to manage a delayed hearing, though the evidence does not establish that they changed the board’s decision.

The proposed art-class placement gave that work a different setting. By then, oil paints, canvases, and stretchers from a recently closed graphic-arts project at Chillicothe Correctional Facility had been sent to Lebanon. Reinert helped Tommy set up an easel and invited him to paint. This opportunity stands in contrast to the pencil sketches covering the isolation-cell wall: the same creative capacity that had taken shape under restrictive conditions could now be given materials, space, and a place in a prison class.

On April 5, 1977, Allen appeared before the parole board and was told he would be released within three weeks. When he headed for the door, the steel door closed behind him; only then did he realize that, on entering, he had not heard the second door close. The detail returns the narrative to the institution’s threshold, now experienced from the direction of departure rather than arrival. Lebanon had been a feared return during the legal proceedings, a place of isolation and medical crisis, and a setting for improvised work; the parole decision finally made it a place Milligan could leave.