"It's pretty unbelievable to think you're paying to stay in a jail," said Vinnie Macri, a guest from Chicago, as he drained his beer and surveyed the beehive of activity in the lobby bar. "But they've done an awesome job."

In an effort to capture the hip, affluent traveler's imagination, developers have reinvented farmhouses, monasteries, caves, even a Boeing 747 jet as chic new lodgings. But the industry's budding global trend is to transform hubs of incarceration into boutique hotels, reveling in the paradox of charging guests to sleep where the original inhabitants dreamed of escape.