Those signs just make me want to pick up hitchhikers even more!

The typically white-on-green signs shown near US interstate exits are navigational aids, not public safety messages.

If the local prison is on the exit, it's just the single most notable landmark.

Road signs are like zip codes : they aren't assigned based on desirability but volume of need.

While more Americans visit a library or courthouse than visit a prison, such places are almost always highly local. If you or your loved ones are sent to prison, it's probably going to be somewhere you aren't familiar with.

And don't discount that a lot of prisons were built as "job providers* in rural communities, so there are a considerable amount of employees that have to locate the place.

(If you want to be depressed about the American prison industrial complex, look up the statewide budgets for the departments of incarceration and contrast them with highway construction or education )