In the mid-1980s Kendall Reese was arrested for a felony drug charge on the block where he lived in North Philadelphia and subsequently sentenced to federal prison. For reasons he never understood, Reese was sent to Holmesburg Prison to serve out his time. Nicknamed “the Terrordrome,” this maximum-security prison housed Pennsylvania’s worst criminals before it was closed in 1995. “At the time, it was filled with killers, 90 percent of which were never getting out,” Reese says.
