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This is the place where some of the men who fought at the OK Corral were held; the place where mythical outlaw Ben Wade was headed in the movie “3:10 to Yuma.� The museum tells a story of the Old West, with relics of the gunfights and jail escapes of old.

But it also tells a story that resonates today, if you look carefully.

The first female detainee at the prison was , who was convicted of manslaughter in 1878. The prison didn’t have any facilities for women, so they just put her in solitary confinement, in an area that today is marked “the dark cell.� There she was, alone in the darkness, for 42 days before she was released and pardoned because the punishment was simply too cruel.

Next came Manuela Fimbres, in prison on an accessory to murder charge. She had a baby while there; and the prison had no way to properly care for either of them. Eventually, she was pardoned out of concern for her child’s health.

Reading the details of her story, I thought immediately of Blair Clevenger. She’s in the women’s prison in Vandalia today because she smoked a joint while on probation. She says it was to ease the nausea from morning sickness. Saline County Circuit Court Judge Dennis Rolf sent her back to prison on a probation violation, to protect her baby, he said. She had been living at a sober home facility, battling her drug addiction. The home wanted her back.

More than a century after the building of the territorial prison in Yuma, we’ve learned some things. We build prisons for women now. But short of using concrete instead of stone, they aren’t much different than the place on the bluff in the desert that now stands as a museum to remember how things were.

In some ways, they are worse. At the turn of the century, governors took pity on women having babies in prison; these days, at least in some circumstances, not so much.

In the time since the Yuma prison was carved out of granite, the U.S. has become the mass incarceration capital of the world, putting more people in prison — men and women — than any other country in the world. The U.S. cages 664 out of every 100,000 people, according to the latest statistics from the nonprofit . That’s a rate five times higher than most of our closest allies. In Missouri, the story is even worse, where we jail 735 of every 100,000 residents of the state.

More than half the people in Missouri prisons are there on probation or parole violations, in part because we’ve built a system that makes it easier for people to be sent back to prison than to serve their time and come home to families and jobs.

Museums and old buildings preserved from a century or two ago exist to help us learn about our past. Standing ever so briefly in the solitary confinement chamber at the Yuma Territorial Prison is a reminder that we haven’t learned enough from our past in this country when it comes to constructing a criminal justice system that serves the public good. We’ve replaced iron and granite with steel and concrete, but in the century since this relic in the desert was closed, we’ve built more and more prisons; we’ve turned them into profit centers for private companies; we’ve lost the humanity that once led to quick pardons; and we have created little connection between our rush to incarcerate our fellow humans and our desire for public safety.

If mass incarceration worked, the U.S. would be the safest country in the world; but it does not, and we are not. I went to a prison on vacation to soak in a bit of Old West nostalgia, and instead I stared into a dark American present that is neither just nor humane.