Here's some history for you. Alcatraz Island is located in the San Francisco Bay, CA. Often referred to as "The Rock", the small island was developed with facilities for a lighthouse, a military fortification, a military prison and a federal prison.
Beginning in November 1969, the island was occupied for more than 19 months by a group of Aboriginal peoples from San Francisco who were part of a wave of Native activism
across the nation with public protests through the 1970s. In 1972,
Alcatraz became a national recreation area and received designation as a
National Historic Landmark in 1986.
Today, the island's facilities are managed by the National Park Service as part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area; it is open to tours. Visitors can reach the island by ferry ride from Pier 33, near Fisherman's Wharf, San Francisco. Hornblower Cruises
and Events, operating under the name Alcatraz Cruises, is the official
ferry provider to and from the island.
The schedule changed a bit over the years, but most of the time an inmate's day was like this:
Wake up bell at 6:30. Stand up and be counted. Get dressed, clean your cell, march to the mess hall for breakfast. Return from breakfast to your cell and get counted. Get ready for work. March to the recreation yard, line up for work details and get counted. March to work and get counted. Counts every half hour at work.
Return to the cell house around 11:30 and get counted. Into the mess hall for lunch. Back into your cell after lunch and get counted. Back to work and get counted. Finish work at 4:30, back to the cellhouse and get counted. Into the mess hall for dinner, back to the cell, get counted. Get counted throughout the evening.
Lights out at 9:30, then you get counted, while sleeping, every hour during the night.
Weekends followed the same basic schedule, with chapel and yard time instead of work; holidays on Alcatraz meant a movie and yard time for the inmates. Twice a week, showers got worked into the schedule.
10 Things You May Not Know About Alcatraz
1. Al Capone played banjo in the inmate band.
The notorious gangster and mob boss was among the first prisoners to
occupy the new Alcatraz federal prison in August 1934. Capone had bribed
guards to receive preferential treatment while serving his tax-evasion
sentence in Atlanta, but that changed after his transfer to the island
prison. The conditions broke Capone. “It looks like Alcatraz has got me
licked,” he reportedly told his warden. In fact, Convict No. 85 became
so cooperative that he was permitted to play banjo in the Alcatraz
prison band, the Rock Islanders, which gave regular Sunday concerts for
other inmates.
2. There were no confirmed prisoner escapes from Alcatraz.
A total of 36 inmates put the supposedly “escape-proof” Alcatraz to the
test. Of those convicts, 23 were captured, six were shot to death and
two drowned. The other five went missing and were presumed drowned,
including Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin, whose 1962
attempted breakout inspired the 1979 film “Escape from Alcatraz.” The
crafty trio chipped away at the rotting concrete cell walls with
sharpened spoons and fashioned decoy heads complete with used locks of
hair from the barbershop that they placed in their beds to fool the
guards. Their possessions were found floating in San Francisco Bay, but
no bodies were ever recovered, leading some to speculate that they may
have engineered a successful escape.
3. Alcatraz is named for sea birds.
Before criminals became its denizens, the windswept island was home to
large colonies of brown pelicans. When Spanish Lieutenant Juan Manuel de
Ayala became the first known European to sail through the Golden Gate
in 1775, he christened the rocky outcrop “La Isla de los Alcatraces,”
meaning “Island of the Pelicans.” The name eventually became Anglicized
to “Alcatraz.” With the inmates gone, gulls and cormorants are now the
most plentiful inhabitants of Alcatraz.
4. In spite of his nickname, the “Birdman of Alcatraz” had no birds in the prison.
While Robert Stroud was serving a manslaughter sentence for killing a
bartender in a brawl, he fatally stabbed a guard at Leavenworth Prison
in 1916. After President Woodrow Wilson commuted his death sentence to a
life of permanent solitary confinement, Stroud began to study
ornithological diseases, write and illustrate two books and raise
canaries and other birds in his Leavenworth cell. He was ordered to give
up his birds in 1931, and he was banned from having any avian cellmates
during his 17 years inside Alcatraz, which began in 1942. The 1962
movie “Birdman of Alcatraz,” for which Burt Lancaster received an
Academy Award nomination just weeks before “The Rock” closed, was
largely fictitious.
5. After the prison stood dormant for six years, Native American activists occupied Alcatraz.
Following two previous brief occupations, a group of nearly 100 Native
American activists, led by Mohawk Richard Oakes, took over the island in
November 1969. Citing an 1868 treaty that granted unoccupied federal
land to Native Americans, the protestors demanded the deed to Alcatraz
in order to establish a university and cultural center. Their
proclamation included an offer to purchase the island for “$24 in glass
beads and red cloth”—the same price reportedly paid by Dutch settlers
for Manhattan in 1626. Federal marshals removed the last of the
protestors in June 1971, but some of their graffiti remains. When the
National Park Service recently rebuilt an Alcatraz water tower, it made
sure to repaint the red graffiti that read “Peace and Freedom. Welcome.
Home of the Free Indian Land.”
6. Military prisoners were Alcatraz’s first inmates.
Once the Gold Rush of the 1840s turned San Francisco into a boomtown,
Alcatraz was dedicated to military use. The U.S. Army began
incarcerating military prisoners inside the new fortress in the late
1850s. During the Civil War, prisoners included Union deserters and
Confederate sympathizers. The cells were also used to imprison Native
Americans who had land disagreements with the federal government,
American soldiers who deserted to the Filipino cause during the
Spanish-American War and Chinese civilians who resisted the Army during
the Boxer Rebellion.
7. Alcatraz was home to the Pacific Coast’s first lighthouse.
When a small lighthouse on top of the rocky island was activated in
1854, it became the first of its kind on the West Coast of the United
States. The beacon became obsolete in the early 1900s after the U.S.
Army constructed a cell house that blocked its view of the Golden Gate. A
new, taller lighthouse replaced it in 1909.
8. The country’s worst criminals were not automatically shipped to Alcatraz.
The convicts housed in Alcatraz were not necessarily those who had
committed the most violent or heinous crimes, but they were the convicts
most in need of an attitude adjustment–the most incorrigible and
disobedient inmates in the federal penal system. They had bribed guards
and attempted escapes, and a trip to Alcatraz was intended to get them
to follow the rules so that they could return to other federal
facilities.
Federal officials may have initially doubted that any escaping inmates
could survive the swim to the mainland across the cold, swift waters of
San Francisco Bay, but it did happen. In 1962, prisoner John Paul Scott
greased himself with lard, squeezed through a window and swam to shore.
He was so exhausted upon reaching the foot of the Golden Gate Bridge
that police discovered him lying unconscious in hypothermic shock.
Today, hundreds complete the 1.5-mile swim annually during the Escape
from Alcatraz Triathlon.
10. Inmates requested transfers to Alcatraz.
While Alcatraz was certainly not Club Med, its tough-as-nails reputation
was a bit of a Hollywood creation. The prison’s one-man-per-cell policy
appealed to some inmates because it made them less vulnerable to attack
by fellow jailbirds. Alcatraz’s first warden, James A. Johnston, knew
poor food was often the cause of prison riots, so he prided himself on
serving good food, and inmates could return for as many helpings as they
wanted. Inmates who behaved had access to privileges including monthly
movies and a library with 15,000 books and 75 popular magazine
subscriptions. Overall, some prisoners considered the conditions inside
Alcatraz to be more attractive than at other federal prisons, and
several asked to be moved there.
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