FCI Ray Brook has one of the more unusual origin stories in the federal prison system. The site in the Adirondacks near Lake Placid, New York, was originally built to serve as the Olympic Village for the 1980 Winter Olympics. Congress had approved federal funding for that Olympic housing back in 1976 on the condition that the buildings serve a secondary, permanent use afterward, and a federal prison was chosen as that follow-up purpose. So the dormitories that briefly housed the world's top winter athletes during the Lake Placid Games were converted into prison housing almost immediately after, with the facility formally dedicated as a penitentiary that same year, in September 1980. The dual-use plan drew some local protest at the time, with demonstrators objecting to pairing an Olympic celebration with a prison's opening. Today it operates as a medium-security facility for male inmates, and it remains, as far as anyone can tell, the only prison in the world to have once served as an Olympic Village. For families, it's a striking bit of history behind an otherwise fairly typical medium-security institution tucked into a remote part of upstate New York near the Canadian border.