The Forgotten Tale of How America Converted Its 1980 Olympic Village Into a Prison

(via Atlas Obscura)  For two weeks in the winter of 1980, a small town in upstate New York had an Olympic Village filled with 1,800 of the world’s most elite athletes. Despite Cold War tensions, the mood in the village was jovial; the athletes shared meals, traded pins, and gathered in the Village’s “psychedelic room full of blinking electronic game machines” for endless rounds of pinball. But a short six months later, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons had converted the Olympic Village into Federal Correctional Institution Ray Brook, still standing today.