This chapter highlights the city jail, where William Crummie took Amelia Norman on the night she attacked Henry Ballard. It describes the city jail as a massive, gloomy, stone structure known popularly as “the Tombs,” which had been encroached upon by city streets and gradually ruined by the waste emitted by tanneries, slaughterhouses, and breweries. It also talks about novelist Ned Buntline, who described the effect that the the Tombs' solemn stone assemblage of steps, columns, palm leaves, and winged, snake-surrounded sphere had on one of his characters. The chapter looks at the Dickensian rhetoric, which was part of the melodramatic nineteenth-century literary and journalistic style that celebrated the titillating horrors of the slum. It cites the Tombs's multiple official names that expressed its various functions, such as City Prison, Halls of Justice, and House of Detention.