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Alcatraz

The United States Penitentiary (USP) Alcatraz was one of the most famous and controversial prisons in American history. Located on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay, California, it was operated from 1934 to 1963 by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. Before that, the U.S. Army had maintained a military prison on the site for nearly 70 years. USP Alcatraz housed some of the country's most notorious criminals, including Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly. Reputed to be the most secure prison in the United States at the time, it was popularly known as “The Rock” and “America's Devil's Island.”

History

The Bay Area's original inhabitants, the Ohlone tribe of Native Americans, may have visited the rocky, 12-acre island to fish and gather food in the centuries before the arrival of Europeans, but apparently they established no permanent settlements there. Nor did the Spanish occupy the island after explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala sailed through the Golden Gate in 1775 and named it after the many alcatraces, or pelicans, that he saw nesting there.

In the 1850s, however, the U.S. Army established a fort on Alcatraz, to defend one of the most important seaports in the newly admitted state of California. Over the next half-century, the site gradually evolved into an important disciplinary barracks for military prisoners.

By the 1860s, the Army had begun using a portion of the fortress to incarcerate soldiers convicted in courts-martial, as well as a few civilians suspected of sympathizing with the Confederacy during the Civil War. In the 1870s and 1880s, the Army added more cell space on the island, and during the Spanish-American War (1898–1900) the population of military prisoners approached 450. The transition from military post to military prison culminated in 1907, when Alcatraz ceased entirely to operate as a fort. That year, the Army redesignated the site as the Pacific Branch of the U.S. Military Prison, and over the next two years it demolished the citadel that had anchored the fort's defenses, erecting in its place a large, permanent cellhouse. The Army finally closed the prison in 1933 because it was too expensive to operate, the salt air was causing the buildings to deteriorate, and the Army deemed the facility's highly public location to be an embarrassment.

Alcatraz Becomes a Federal Prison

About the same time that the Army was preparing to withdraw from Alcatraz, the United States was in the throes of one of the most wrenching crime waves in its history. The imposition of Prohibition in 1920, and the onset of the Depression less than 10 years later, gave rise to an unprecedented explosion of organized criminal activities, gangland wars, bank robberies, and kidnappings that terrorized the nation. As soon as the Army left Alcatraz, the U.S. Department of Justice moved in to transform the facility into a high-profile super-prison to hold the toughest underworld figures and make a bold statement about the federal government's war on crime.

The responsibility for managing the new USP Alcatraz fell to the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP). The Justice Department had established the BOP only a few years earlier, in 1929, to provide more consistent, centralized, and professional control over the handful of far-flung federal prisons that then existed. It would serve as the prison for the prison system—for those very few inmates who had proven too disruptive, violent, or escape prone to be managed even at such maximum-security penitentiaries as USP Atlanta or USP Leavenworth. Alcatraz would accept few direct commitments of inmates from the courts. Instead, nearly all its inmates would be designated to Alcatraz only after having committed serious infractions at lower-security institutions.

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