"The Tombs" is a New York colloquialism for what is now the Manhattan House of Detention for Men. The name was first applied not to the building shown in drawing eight, but to the building which had occupied the same block in the nineteenth century. The design of the old Tombs, also a prison, had been inspired by an 1837 photograph of showing Egyptian tomb – one of the first photographs of middle eastern to be circulated in New York. As the two buildings resembled each other in their design, and, one assumes, in the morbidity of their purpose, the name "Tombs" was applied to the prison. Herman Melville literalizes this connection in "Bartleby the Scriviner;" it is the Tombs to which Bartleby is removed at the end of the story, and there that he starves himself to death.

The name "Tombs" was used with such regularity that in 1902, when a new prison was constructed in its place, the name was retained. This 1902 structure is the building that Marcus represents in chapter eight. Like its predecessor, the 1902 Tombs was an inadequate facility. The old Tombs had been demolished in part because it began sinking into the marshy ground on which it was built, and the new one proved no more immune to this problem than the old. Even as early as 1921 reformist rhetoric made extensive use of its structural and bureaucratic inadequacies, citing it as an example of the worst elements of the criminal justice system. A third prison, also called the Tombs, has occupied the site since the 1980s.

Chapter eight is the first of two chapter which focus on New York’s carceral spaces, but where the other – "Queensboro Bridge" – emphasizes the safe distance at which the imprisoned are kept, "The Tombs Prison" emphasizes the alarming proximity of the criminals inside. Marcus works in his prose to distance the prison from the surrounding city by calling attention to its medieval appearance. Its design transports it to a different time and a different continent. He also represents the prisoners’ very proximity to the rest of the city as a function of distance; because they are so aware of the "countless activities" available only to free New Yorkers, they are doubly imprisoned, and therefor doubly removed from the world outside. Their "double burden" allows Marcus to restructure as gratitude any sense of unease which the Tombs’ proximity might evoke in his readers.