I know this is an old inquiry but maybe it will still reach you. Ralph L. Goodrich was a school teacher in Little Rock in 1862 and 1863. To avoid being conscripted into the Confederate Service, in August 1863 he took a job as a guard at the Little Rock Penitentiary. He even slept there in the days before the fall of Little Rock, fearing that he would be dragged out of his boarding house bed and thrown into Gen. Price's trenches. Anyway, according to Goodrich's diary, prisoners convicted of civil crimes were released on the day of the Union occupation in September 1863 -- many of them going south with the Confederate army. It appears that the Union army then used the penitentiary as a Confederate prison for a time, possibly sharing quarters with those convicted of civil crimes while the city was under martial law. To read more about Goodrich's eyewitness account, see: http://goodrichpoems.wordpress.com/ and go to August and September 1863 in the diary entries. By the way, that penitentiary sat on the present site of the Arkansas Statehouse. In the 1860's, that location was in the western suburbs of the town.