Cook County Jail is a hellhole? Not shocked over here.

It seems that Patrick Fitzgerald, the crusading federal prosecutor who got Scooter Libby and inspires many rumors about Daley and Blagojevich going to prison, has been investigating Cook County Jail. That would be the fortress-prison on California Avenue that serves as Chicago's stand-in for the Gates in Mordor.

And you know, it turns out that it's a hellhole. Apparently, they beat people there die unnecessarily, get limbs amputated when they should have been saved by treatment, get beaten on a regular basis by sadistic guards and get terrible medical care.

I've been there once (not as an inmate, thank Dog) and that was enough. You could feel the evil emanate from the walls. It really does look like an evil madman's castle, too, which doesn't help.

Just a quick story about Cook County Jail: my mother-in-law, like my mother, always swore that she'd never bail her kids out of jail. If they did something to land there, they were on their own. But when her son did do something dumb in traffic and end up having to spend the night in jail, he was going to end up in Cook County Jail that night.

She bailed him out. She said she wanted him to learn a lesson, not get murdered.