SC’s oldest prison held worst inmates for more than a century

What would become South Carolina’s most notorious prison slammed its heavy metal doors on its first inmates two years after the end of the Civil War.

Central Correctional Institution would remain in downtown Columbia for 126 years, holding the baddest of the bad before it was shuttered in 1994, leveled and turned into an apartment complex with the benign name of CanalSide because it fronts the Columbia Canal.

The stone-and-brick prison, commonly known as CCI, once housed Death Row prisoners and was where dozens met their maker in the electric chair. The state’s worst mass killer, Pee Wee Gaskins, was imprisoned and put to death at CCI.

The prison held 1,300-plus inmates in conditions so overcrowded and violent that it was part of a 1982 lawsuit that resulted in a federal judge ordering in 1990 a prisoner-reduction plan and the Corrections Department spending $202 million to build seven prisons.

“It’s run like an old-style prison,” former inmate Jonathan Robinson said in 1993 after serving two stints at CCI. “Only the strong survive there. The weak get worn down physically and mentally.”

The inmate who filed the suit, Gary Wayne Nelson, was eventually released and went on to earn a law degree and to practice law in New Mexico.

This story was originally published December 18, 2015 at 6:00 AM with the headline "SC’s oldest prison held worst inmates for more than a century."