I first went to prison in the early 1970s — as a reporter, not an inmate — fascinated with the chance to compare portrayals in movies to the stone-and-steel reality.

This particular reality was one of Illinois' toughest-tier lockups: the Menard Correctional Center. Slipped into a narrow flatland between the Mississippi River and a towering bluff line at Chester, the vintage 1878 place did not disappoint.

I didn't exactly see James Cagney, but I did see a docile, white-haired old killer at his prison industry job on a textile loom. He was, a guard told me, the longest-serving inmate, doing life for a murder in the John Dillinger era.

That the guy had been there for 40 years was a breathtaking prospect to a visitor already eager to escape after 40 minutes. Yet my enduring impression was surprise at the inmates' relative freedom of movement.

As I roamed the prison yard with photojournalist/friend Bill Brinson and Warden Jim Greer, I realized that we were at the mercy of a sea of felons outnumbering us maybe 100-to-1. (Greer comforted us with advice to stay within sight of one of the watch towers, where guards with rifles could offer protective fire.)

More than a few inmates were friendly. Some played basketball. One postured himself in a confrontational stance toward Greer, sending my pulse racing until both men broke out laughing and shook hands.

There was no mistaking that it was a dreary place populated by many bad people. But it also was a functioning society of sorts, where I heard laughter and saw horseplay and recognized a sense of purpose among prisoners making furniture and textiles and cigarettes.

Menard was a maximum-security destination for a couple of thousand prisoners presumably deemed unfit for confinement in less severe settings.

A little more than 20 years later, officials began to wonder if maximum security was enough. By 1995, inmate assaults on staff topped 1,000 system-wide. The following year saw the leak of a bizarre home video of infamous mass murderer Richard Speck in a Stateville prison cell, bragging about his carefree life of sex and drugs.

In 1998, Illinois joined the club of states with supermaximum prisons (Missouri never joined) by opening the Tamms Correctional Center. It was named for its location near a speck of a town about 15 miles above the Kentucky border.

Tamms imposed perpetual lockdown in one-man cells for troublemakers hand-picked for assaults, rapes, drug-dealing or the like at other prisons.

I visited later that year to find a clean, efficient house of solitary confinement, where the 255 residents (about half capacity then) were isolated 23 hours a day in 8-by-10-foot cells. Both the furniture and the rules were made of concrete. The daily hour of exercise was spent alone, in a bare concrete pen. I heard no laughing, saw no horseplay and perceived no sense of purpose.

The place has been the subject of almost perpetual complaint and litigation since, as prison advocates allege what several inmates told me one on one: that sensory deprivation was literally driving the residents crazy.

But it is the Illinois financial crisis — not a challenge in court — that appears to be bringing Tamms down.

Gov. Pat Quinn announced in Wednesday's budget address that he plans to close Tamms to help save $83 million on prisons. The state lists Tamms' costs at about $64,000 per year for each of it inmates, almost twice the price at Pontiac, the prison where they're going.

If finalized, the closing will pull a painful legal thorn out of the Department of Corrections' side. But it would be disastrous for the economy of Alexander County, whose dire employment straits were one reason for choosing the Tamms site in the first place.

(Alexander was one of just three counties, with Cook and St. Clair, that Quinn carried in the 2010 election. He'd best not plan on winning there again.)

The governor did not voice an opinion Wednesday on the validity of the controversial supermax concept, or whether its threat to hold troublemakers indefinitely posed an effective deterrent.

After the governor's speech, I tracked the three supermax inmates quoted in my 1998 story. They were still in prison, but their improved behavior had gotten them out of Tamms. Two, in fact, made it all the way to medium security — at Dixon, $25,000 per inmate each year, and Danville, $17,000.