Consensual captivity at the Franklin County Historic Jail
Story by: Alexander Cheves
Photography by: Courtesy of Mark Gundmundsen
January 15, 2020
Visitors to the Franklin County History Jail in Hampton, Iowa, are arrested on site. They can struggle and fight back (within reason) or go quietly. After their “arraignment” before a “judge,” their legs are shackled and they’re escorted to a cell- one that housed real inmates for over 100 years. They’re woken up at 7 a.m. and fed three simple meals a day. Showers are permitted at 9:30 a.m. and 11:15 a.m. Depending on the arrangement, they may be allowed yard or recreation time during the day. Lights out is at 10 p.m., and the experience costs them $350 a night, all-inclusive.
Getting locked up (for real) is my greatest fear, but Mark Gundmundsen, who owns this jail, tells me that he gets about 60 visitors each season looking to live out their jailhouse fantasy, from places like China, Germany, Russia, Singapore, Brazil, South Africa, and the United States. As daunting as it all seems, after talking to him, I realize the place is a liberating experience for many of its visitors. In fact, this type of experience helped Gundmundsen turn his own life around completely.
The 130-year-old building was home to every kind of criminal until the jail closed in 1988. When Gundmundsen bought it five years ago, it was “uninhabitable.” He rewired and replumbed the property restoring it to its historically accurate current state. The jail reopened four years ago but when Gunmundsen got explicit permission from the city pf Hampton to offer this experience, certain limitations were mandated: it had to be historical and no sex would be allowed.
The website purveys it as a purely historical experience, but Gundmundsen’s primary clientele are men into consensual captivity, meaning they want to be incarcerated and controlled by someone else.
“As daunting as it all seems, after talking to him, I realize the place is a liberating experience for many of its visitors.”
“There will be hours of isolation and boredom,” he tells me. “If you’re looking for a wild bondage party, this isn’t it.”
I ask him about the people who share this fetish: do they exclusively want to be locked up in jail or are they okay with being confined elsewhere?
“The jail experience that I offer is only about going to jail, but people who are into captivity like various things,” he says. “I have found lots of guys who like just being locked for hours in puppy cages.”
Gundmundsen describes the jail as “wonderfully oppressive.” I can see what he means; the interior is severe and dungeon-like. “The levers shut and you hear the clanging of the doors,” he says. “It’s so cool. And for me, it’s powerful to have a jail where real inmates once were. Their DNA is there. For people into this, that’s important.” (I learn through Gundmundsen that there is a culture of fetishists who hunt for items used by real inmates.)
Roughly half of his male visitors identify as gay but he has “suspicions about the other half.” Women are welcome—Gundmundsen sets them up in a separate part of the jail—and he is as accommodating as possible for folks with disabilities. The jail has an entrance ramp and bathroom for people with limited mobility. “I try to make the experience as inclusive as possible,” he says, “since so many of us in the kink community have experienced feeling rejected.”
Gundmundsen lives at the jail in the summer and plays the lead warden or sheriff. When he’s not imprisoning people, he shoots videos for his other business, a website called Men In Chains, which bills itself as “the world’s leading porn-free male bondage site.” By “porn-free,” he means no nudity or explicit sex. I ask him if this is due to the city’s mandate—it’s not. The lack of explicit sex on Men In Chains means the site is accessible for people in countries where porn is banned. It also has appeal for those who, like Gundmundsen, see bondage on its own as a complete erotic experience—not as foreplay or as an accouterment to sex.
“Gundmundsen describes the jail as ‘wonderfully oppressive’.”
Many videos are shot at the jail, but Gundmundsen stresses the businesses are two different entities. “A visitor isn’t going to be wrapped in duct tape mummification or anything like that, because that wouldn’t have happened in jail,” he says. This is the sort of stuff that happens in his videos. “However, we do use handcuffs, leg irons, and straitjackets. All those were used in jails during the 20th century.”
Gundmundsen was born into a Mormon family. “Growing up, things were very strict,” he says. “I had to wear conservative clothing and obey all the laws.”
He was interested in jails and bondage as a teenager, and started collecting handcuffs in his twenties. Ten years ago, he was active in the Mormon church, married to a woman, and living in the Bay Area. He had never acted on his desires for incarceration until he coaxed his wife into giving him permission to spend a week with a BDSM Master. He was shackled and locked in a cell-like cage.
“It gave me a chance to think, and that thinking deprogrammed me out of the cult I was in. I figured myself out,” he says. He started crying and laughing uncontrollably while he was locked up—a visceral response to imprisonment that he’s
since witnessed in visitors to his jail. After he left his fantasy prison, he then left his real-life prison too: he got a divorce from his wife, left the Mormon church, and started living openly as a gay man.
“For the first time in my life I was actually happy,” he says. “That’s why I don’t charge huge amounts of money for the jail experience.”
Gundmundsen wants others to experience what he had— an awakening. Although he tries to arrange it so that inmates share cellblocks with strangers (who nearly always end up exchanging addresses or even arrange to come back together),
Gundmundsen believes the hours of isolation are more important than potential friendships. “You need that period of quiet when nothing’s happening,” he says. “There’s a period when some people need to meditate and figure things out.”
“He started crying and laughing uncontrollably while he was locked up—a visceral response to imprisonment that he’s since witnessed in visitors to his jail.”
He says the real mental journey happens after someone has been locked up long enough to get bored and their minds are left to wander. It’s an activity he’s very familiar with: this whole time, Gundmundsen has been answering my questions over the phone from a locked cell in his Master’s garage in Arizona, with his feet shackled. He doesn’t get to experience much imprisonment when he’s running the jail in the summer months, so he catches up in the winter.
“I’ve received letters from visitors saying that they were totally changed by the experience,” he says. The jail has a high recidivism rate—roughly 60 percent come back. And according to the testimonials on the site, Gundmundsen has done exactly what he set out to: “Being in my cell for almost 12 hours each night in darkness was great,” one person wrote. “The isolation and darkness definitely gives one time to think.”
He knows that some communities might respond strongly to the concept of fetishizing an institution that is so wracked with systemic problems and cruelties. For-profit prisons across the country remain a blight on American culture; they benefit from a system that disproportionately oppresses and harms communities of color. Most of Gundmundsen’s inmates are white, so one could make the argument that incarceration fetishism is a privilege.
In a way, though, Gundmundsen’s jail is nothing like prison, because visitors willingly enter and are free to leave, which distinguishes it from the system it was once part of. The jail is more like a kind of medicine than any sort of punishment, bringing to mind the idea of monks who spend months or years in solitude, seeking enlightenment. As fraught as it may be to some, it no doubt offers visitors a chance to disconnect from the world, surrender control, and be someone else. If you’re turned on by the idea of being locked up, turn yourself in; laugh, cry, and then find out who you really are.
