Alcatraz Prison
Alcatraz was the country’s first military prison, where famous criminals such as Al Capone were held under tight security. The prison sits on a 5 hectare cliff, and the icy waters of a 2.5 km wide strait with dangerous currents, sharks and sewage separate Alcatraz from the San Francisco coast. No one has ever escaped from Alcatraz alive. For a long time, the island was the subject of heated territorial disputes with indigenous peoples. Because it cost more money to maintain the guards and food brought to the island than it would have if the prisoners had lived in the Ritz Hotel, the prison was closed in 1963. From 1969 to 1971, the island was occupied by Indian chiefs in protest of the U.S. occupation of Native lands. Their opposition to the FBI is immortalized in the museum’s displays at the pier and in the “This is Indian Land” graffiti on the water tower. Water for the shrubs and trees now growing had to be delivered to U.S. servicemen who were held in the building, which served as a penal barracks until 1934. Alcatraz Prison, along with the Golden Gate Bridge, is considered one of the city’s major landmarks.
Video: Alcatraz
ContentsTourists
‘
History of Alcatraz
Suddenly, the city was the center of the world’s attention. The young state of California needed protection from the sea, and Alcatraz Island was the choice. This piece of land turned out to be the perfect place – just one mile from the city, from here you could see all the ships trying to dock in the harbor of San Francisco. Said – done. In 1854, the first defenses were built and 11 cannons were installed (later to become more than a hundred).
.
Together with Fort Point (Fort Point) and Lime Point (Lime Point) Alcatraz formed a kind of “protective” triangle, defending the bay from attacks. By the end of the decade, the island had its first military prisoner. Over time, the defensive function of Alcatraz decreased (by the way, the island never had to use its weapons in action), but as a prison it acted for more than 100 years. In 1909, the Army demolished the fortress, leaving the basement level to be used as the foundation for a new prison. From 1909 to 1911, prisoners built the prison building, which belonged to the Pacific Division of the U.S. Army Disciplinary Barracks. It was this building that later became known as the Rock. The Army used the island for more than 80 years: from 1850 to 1933. In 1909, after 56 years of use, the first Alcatraz lighthouse was removed during the construction of the prison. A second lighthouse was installed next to the prison building on December 1, 1909. And in 1963, the lighthouse was modified and made automatic and self-contained, and no longer needed 24-hour maintenance.
.
Alcatraz was the Army’s first long-term detention prison and began to gain a reputation for severity for offenders who faced harsh disciplinary action. Punishment could include assignment to hard labor, placement in solitary confinement with a limited ration of bread and water, and the list did not stop there.
.
The average age of imprisoned servicemen was 24, and most served short sentences for desertion or less serious offenses. There were some who served long sentences for insubordination to commanders, physical abuse, theft, or murder.
An interesting element of the military order was the prohibition of being in cells during daylight hours, except in special cases of forced confinement. High-ranking military prisoners were free to roam the prison grounds, except for the guard rooms, which were located a level above.
During the Great Depression (late 1920s to mid-1930s), crime rates increased dramatically and the era of organized crime began. Large Mafia families and individual gangs waged war for spheres of influence, often victimizing civilians and law enforcement officers. Gangsters controlled the power in the cities, many officials received bribes and turned a blind eye to the crimes being committed. In response to the gangsters’ crimes, the government decided to reopen Alcatraz as a federal prison. Alcatraz met the basic requirements: to house dangerous criminals far away from society and to scare the other criminals who were still at large. The head of the Federal Prisons Sanford Bates and Attorney General Homer Cummings initiated a project to renovate the prison. Robert Burge, one of the best experts in the field of security at the time, was hired for the project. He was to redesign the prison. During the reconstruction, only the foundation was left intact, and the building itself was completely rebuilt.
.
The rules at Alcatraz had changed dramatically. Each prisoner now had only his own cell and minimal privileges for food, water, clothing, medical and dental care. Prisoners on Alcatraz were forbidden to have any personal belongings. A prisoner had to earn the privileges of socializing with visitors, visiting the prison library and writing by hard work and impeccable behavior. Prisoners with bad behavior were not allowed to do prison work. All privileges were removed for the slightest misbehavior. All media were forbidden in Alcatraz, including reading newspapers. All letters, as in any other prison, were corrected by a prison official. Federal prison wardens had the right to transfer any delinquent prisoner to Alcatraz
Incarceration at Alcatraz was not sentenced by the courts, it was usually transferred there for particularly “distinguished” prisoners from other prisons. It was impossible to voluntarily choose Alcatraz to serve a sentence. Although exceptions were made for some gangsters.
.One of the first such inmates of Alcatraz prison was Al Capone. The police were after him for a very long time, and he ended up behind bars as a result of trivial non-payment of taxes! At first the offender sat in Atlanta, but soon his “comrades in arms” settled around the prison, and Al Capone quietly led his group right from the prison, where he acquired an army of servants from prisoners, bribed the prison authorities, and he was constantly visited by visitors. He was “sitting tight” until he ended up in Alcatraz, whence he came out an infirm and terminally ill old man.
.
Another famous Alcatraz convict was Robert Stroud, nicknamed “the birdman”. In reality, Stroud never bred birds at Alcatraz, and in fact, spent most of his sentence not in that prison at all. Nor was he the lovable uncle that Burt Lancaster portrayed him as in the movie Birdman Of Alcatraz (1962). In 1909, Stroud went to prison for robbery. But while he was serving his sentence in a Washington prison, he attacked a cellmate. He was transferred to a Kansas prison. But in 1916, he killed a guard there, for which Stroud was sentenced to death. However, then-President Wilson, on the petition of Stroud’s mother, commuted the sentence to life imprisonment. In 1942, he was transferred to Alcatraz. There he began studying birds, which he had been interested in since childhood, and even wrote two books on canaries and common diseases. Seeing such a keen scientific interest, the prison administration allowed Stroud to study birds in kind. But Stroud did not change himself, and in the bird cages were often found prohibited in prison items. He spent only 17 years in Alcatraz – 6 years in “D Block” and 11 years in the prison hospital. In 1959, he was sent to the Medical Center for Federal Offenders in Springfield, Missouri, where he died in 1963.
.Another legend of Alcatraz is George Kelly the Machine Gun. He got his nickname because he always used a machine gun when robbing banks. He was responsible for bootlegging, murders, bank robberies, and even the kidnapping of an Oklahoma oil tycoon. Machine Gun Kelly received a life sentence and spent 17 years in Alcatraz before, again for health reasons, he was moved to another prison where he died shortly afterward.
.
And there was also a rumor among the prisoners that the island was full of man-eating sharks that would immediately maul anyone in the water. A shark named Bruce was often told about, which the guards supposedly fed on purpose so that it would always be “on alert.”
.
It is reliably known that only one prisoner named John Scott managed to swim to shore. It happened in 1962. At the end of the swim, the fugitive was so exhausted and exhausted that he collapsed on the shore, where he was found by two boys. The children thought the man had tried to commit suicide by throwing himself off the nearby Golden Gate Bridge and called the police for help, who immediately identified the fugitive and brought him back to Alcatraz.
.
The most famous and prepared was the escape of the two Englin brothers and their accomplice Morris, which served as the basis for the plot of the movie Escape from Alcatraz. Using spoons smuggled out of the mess hall, they made a passage in the wall and escaped through the ventilation shafts. Most notably, they made their “heads” out of cement, glue, paint, and hair stolen from a barbershop and placed them on pillows so that guards only noticed their absence in the morning during roll call. It is still unknown how this escape ended – in the 38 years since then, the fugitives have never been reported anywhere, but there is no reliable evidence of their deaths either. And “heads” can be seen in Alcatraz in the cells of the fugitives – they are actually very skillfully made.
.
In total, during the 29 years (1934-1963) that Alcatraz was used as a federal prison, it is officially believed that there were no successful attempts to escape from the Rock, but to this day five Alcatraz inmates are listed as “missing, presumed drowned.”
.
