Robert Riggs
They called it The Rock. And for nearly a century, it was exactly that—a solid, isolated fragment of stone lodged in the heart of San Francisco Bay.
From the shore, it was a silhouette in the fog, a medieval citadel crowned with searchlights. A twenty-two-acre island fortress, surrounded by swift currents, jagged rocks, and icy waters.
Legends about the severity of incarceration at “The Rock” have made the prison’s name synonymous with severe punishment.
Spanish Navy officer Juan de Ayal landed on the island in 1775. He named it Alcatraz, the Isle of the Pelicans.
It became the “fortress island” in 1850 when President Millard Fillmore signed an executive order designating Alcatraz a military reservation. It would become the most powerful coastal fort west of the Mississippi. Eleven cannons were mounted by 1854. By the Civil War, there were 111, including 15-inch Rodman guns that hurled 450-pound shells into the sea. The island served as a bulwark against Confederate raiders and held sympathizers, saboteurs, and the crew of a privateer.
But Alcatraz's natural geography mattered more than any artillery. The steep cliffs, constant winds, and 53-degree water rendered it ideal for incarceration. By 1861, the Army formally turned the island into the Pacific branch military prison.
During its military phase, the island would house Confederate sympathizers, deserters, and dozens of Native American prisoners. Among the first was Paiute Tom, transferred from Camp McDermit in 1873 and shot two days later under suspicious circumstances.
The most infamous group came in 1895: nineteen Hopi Indians from the Arizona territory, branded "hostiles" for opposing forced farming and the cultural erasure of boarding schools.
For eight months, they lived behind brick walls and iron bars in Alcatraz’s Lower Prison, surrounded by salt spray and silence. They were returned to the tribe after promising to obey all orders, but continued to resist the policies of Washington.
By 1907, the guns were gone. The military declared Alcatraz obsolete as a fort and rechristened it as a disciplinary barracks. From 1909 through 1911, the military prisoners on Alcatraz built a new prison, which was designated the Pacific Branch, U.S. Disciplinary Barracks for the U.S. Army.
It was this prison building that later became famous as "The Rock”.
The new cellblock, completed in 1912, was the largest reinforced concrete building in the world. It had 600 cells. One toilet per man. One bulb. One bed. Isolation is built into concrete.
The U.S. Army used the island for more than 80 years—from 1850 until 1933, when the island was transferred to the U.S. Department of Justice for use by the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Officials sought to create a new, unique prison for those deemed difficult to incarcerate elsewhere in the federal prison system.
A remote site was sought, one that would prohibit constant communication with the outside world by those confined within its walls.
They considered land in remote Alaska.
According to United Press reports from July 27, 1934, “Alcatraz Island, a penitentiary in San Francisco Bay from which it is said there is no possible escape, is to be taken over soon by the federal Department of Justice. The most desperate of this country’s criminals will be imprisoned there.”
On June nineteenth, seven officers at the federal penitentiary annex in Fort Leavenworth arrived in San Francisco. Their orders: begin the transformation. Harden the perimeter. Fortify the systems. Prepare the island for the arrival of America’s most dangerous criminals.
Of the eighteen thousand federal prisoners in the system, only a select few would be chosen. Not the petty thieves or the forgers. Only the incorrigible. The violent. The escape artists.
In the words of one official: “Only the worst will be sent to Alcatraz.”
And so began the second life of the island.
No longer a military outpost.
Not yet a myth.
But a prison with no door — only a view of freedom, forever out of reach.
Because of its isolated location, Alcatraz was dubbed “Devil’s Island” after the infamous French penal colony in the Caribbean.
In the fall of 1934, 211 inmates arrived under tight security, handpicked from the worst of the worst.
The average population ranged between 260 and 275 convicts.
The prison’s roster list read like a most-wanted poster for the nation’s notorious gangsters.
Al Capone, public enemy number one of the Prohibition era, was transferred in a sealed train car.
George “Machine Gun” Kelly, bank robber;
Albert Bates, the kidnapper of Charles F. Urschel, Oklahoma City oil millionaire;
Harold Fontaine, who smuggled guns for the Leavenworth Prison break of December 11, 1931;
Gordon Alcorn, accused in the abduction of Charles Boettcher, a Denver millionaire;
Charles Beers, Thomas Underwood, and Stanley Brown, three of seven prisoners who abducted Warden White of Leavenworth Prison in the 1931 break,
and O. D. Stevens and W. D. May, convicted of a triple slaying in Fort Worth, Texas, and under a twenty-seven-year sentence as well for the $72,000 hold-up of a Texas and Pacific train in February, 1933
Names that once commanded fear were now reduced to numbers. Capone had been Public Enemy Number 1. Here, he was just Prisoner number AZ Eighty-Five.
Hardened criminals who had corrupted other prisons with influence and intimidation were now isolated.
Federal officials wanted to drain the poison from the wider system by excising its most toxic elements.
They selected James A. Johnston as its warden. The businessman and prison administrator with twelve years of experience in the California Department of Corrections would run Alcatraz with an iron fist for the next fourteen years.
The Island Was the Wall.
Alcatraz didn't rely on bars alone. The island itself was the first line of defense. One and a half miles offshore, surrounded by frigid 53 degrees Fahrenheit, fast-moving, swirling currents, and treacherous tides. It dared even the boldest swimmer to try to escape.
Attempts to swim to freedom were suicidal. Even three young champion swimmers—Anastasia Scott, Gloria Seigliano, and Doris McLeod—who crossed the channel under ideal conditions, proved only that success required training, stamina, and freedom. Prisoners had none of the above.
The currents served as the island’s moat. And the presence of patrol boats, Coast Guard surveillance, and a strict 300-yard no-access perimeter turned any escape plan into a logistical nightmare.
Between 1909 and the early 1930s, when Alcatraz was a military prison, about two dozen soldiers managed to escape—none by swimming. Instead, they posed as civilians and boarded nearby vessels. That history shaped the new civilian Alcatraz. Boat traffic was pushed out. Shorelines were illuminated with floodlights.
Armed guards watched from walls and towers. Radio channels tied the island to the mainland’s security infrastructure.
The original army cell block was gutted and refitted to house three hundred thirty-six hand-picked convicts—"hard guys" from other institutions who had shown themselves too disruptive to manage elsewhere.
Steel that defeated hacksaws, locking systems immune to tampering, and watchtowers armed with rifles and machine guns left no margin for rebellion. Even meals were governed with military efficiency. Inmates passed through the mess hall in small, controlled groups.
In August of 1934, a newspaper published a story titled, Tear Gas Pipes Feature Alcatraz Island Prison.
It reported that throughout America’s new “Devil’s Island,” there has been installed “tear gas” pipes in all parts of the penitentiary.
Upon the slightest uprising of inmates, guards could turn a small faucet to release the choking, tear-making vapor to flood the spot of insurrection.
Besides the “running tear gas,” tear gas guns were carried by all of Warden James Johnston’s corps of trained guards. In addition to tear gas, another, more violent gas was kept for extreme emergencies.
The forty guards were selected for Alcatraz from the employees at other government penitentiaries. Their records were investigated exhaustively to make certain the men responsible for maintaining order and discipline were thoroughly reliable.
The Department of Justice drew inspiration from bootleg-era tactics to prevent contraband from entering the island.
No newspapers. No visitors for the first three months.
Mail for prisoners was read and copied by prison authorities to eliminate the chance of coded messages for an escape plan.
Visitation was limited to one day a month, and only after three months of good behavior. Even then, families were separated by bulletproof glass, the room perforated with holes to allow voices through, but not a single object. Not a cigarette. Not a message. Not a file.
Every package was screened. Every conversation was monitored.
The place looked like a fortress because it was one. Fifteen-foot walls, three feet thick, circled the prison yard. Armed guards in watchtowers carried rifles and machine guns.
Others patrolled from catwalks and battlements, trained to shoot to kill. Inside, mechanical locking systems and tool-proof steel sealed the inmates off in three-tiered cell blocks.
But the control ran deeper than steel.
Guards were unarmed while escorting inmates to limit the risk of being overpowered. But from above, in concealed towers, marksmen kept their eyes on every move.
Riot control gas could be released in seconds. The mess hall served food cafeteria-style—a modern touch—but prisoners had to eat everything they selected. And after every meal, knives and forks were checked back in like borrowed tools.
Warden Johnston and his team didn’t just want to house these men. They wanted to sever them from their former lives. From influence. From loyalty. From hope.
The public watched from a distance. Tourists pointed to the island from Fisherman’s Wharf. Newspapers dubbed it "a twentieth-century Bastille."
Alcatraz became a crucible where 20th-century penology tested the boundary between discipline and control. Even the guards were subject to scrutiny—handpicked, monitored, and required to live on the island. Weapons were locked away between shifts. Order wasn’t just enforced—it was engineered.
By late 1934, the prison stood not only as a deterrent but as a message. The era of glorified gangsters was over. Their stories would no longer be written in blood and bullets, but in the silence of isolation.
In mid-1936, Texas inmate Joe Bowers made a break for the prison fence.
He came to Alcatraz on December 4, 1934, from Leavenworth to complete a twenty-five-year sentence for robbing a post office in Tacoma, California.
Bowers was sentenced in 1932 and had 21 years of imprisonment ahead of him on Alcatraz.
The forty-year-old mail robber tried to scale a wire fence around the work area on the island’s west side, facing San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
Guards shouted at him, but Bowers ignored them. The trained marksman who practiced daily opened fire. Bowers was struck in the right shoulder, lung, and thigh by bullets,
He died as he plunged over a sixty-foot cliff to the rocky shore below.
Newspapers later reported that Bowers’s prison break was a suicide mission.
Convict stories reached newspapers claiming he was, quote, “stir-crazy.” He had attempted suicide twice, once by butting his head against one of the thick stone walls of the cell blocks.
Bowers had apparently chosen death as a way out of the rock-bound prison where he faced 21 years of almost total isolation from the world.
It was an object lesson of Alcatraz’s reputed escape-proof claims to newly arrived prisoners.
Three years after its opening, two Oklahoma convicts vanished into thick fog on a December morning in 1937. They exposed the vulnerabilities of America’s most fortified prison.
Warden James A. Johnston didn’t mince words. The escape from Alcatraz wasn’t a rash decision. It was the patient work of two men who knew what they were doing and waited for the perfect cover.
According to Johnston, convicts Theodore Cole and Ralph Roe sawed and wriggled their way out of one of the prison’s most secure features: a detention window embedded with iron bars and fortified with heavy glass. The aperture they forced open measured just eight and a half inches by eighteen inches. Barely wide enough for a body, but more than enough for two desperate men.
“They must have worked on it for months,” Johnston told reporters on December 20th, 1937. “A few minutes each day, patiently sawing at the bars in the machine shop.” He detailed how the men used sharp instruments to gradually weaken the window, never drawing attention to their slow assault on the supposedly escape-proof barrier.
Once through, they snatched a wrench—likely stolen from the same machine shop—and pried open a gate that led past a wire fence and over a 20-foot cliff to the churning waters below. The fog that rolled in that Thursday became their final cover.
Whether the sea swallowed them or they slipped into the shadows with help was never resolved.
Johnston initially believed they had drowned in the bay’s swift tide. But days later, he admitted another possibility: “It’s quite likely they were picked up by a boat manned by accomplices by pre-arrangement.”
A few days later, on Christmas Day of 1937, a newspaper story predicted that a bloody revolt was brewing among the prisoners at Alcatraz.
Robert Moxon, who was released after serving three years, gave a first-person account of life at the grim federal penitentiary in San Francisco Bay.
Moxon was the first prisoner sent to Alcatraz to finish a five-year sentence for forgery.
He opened the story stating, “Thank God, I Am Out of Alcatraz. For months, I lived on edge, clenched in fear, waiting for the signal that would ignite one of the bloodiest uprisings in the history of American prisons. The riot hasn’t happened yet—but it will. The rage inside Alcatraz is that volatile.”
“Al Capone was the most despised inmate on the Rock. Nicknamed “Phoney Capone,” he arrived in August 1934, just weeks after me.
He was loathed—not just for his crimes, but for his vanity and the belief he was currying favor with the warden. Rumors spread that his fellow convicts from Leavenworth had been waiting for a chance to kill him.
One day, Jimmy Lucas—the prison barber—stabbed Capone in the back with a pair of scissors, puncturing a kidney. Later, Capone was ambushed while polishing the floor—knocked unconscious with a floor buffer.
Now, he moves only under the protection of two fellow Italians. They believe he’ll help their families when he gets out. He won’t,” concluded Moxon.
Moxon recounted the brutality of guards in the system. “Guards enforce discipline with lethal certainty. Theodore Bowers, a Black inmate working garbage detail, once tried to dislodge a tin can lodged on a barbed-wire fence. A tower guard shot him dead. The official report claimed he was “attempting to escape.” The guard was later promoted.”
He said there was madness behind bars. “At least 25 of the 235 prisoners I lived among had lost their minds. Three cages in the prison hospital housed the insane, who howled and ganged up on one another until one was shipped off and replaced by the next to “blow his top.”
One man, “Arky” Persful—once a prison guard himself—chopped off part of his left hand with a hatchet and begged a fellow inmate to sever the other. He wanted a transfer to the federal hospital for the insane in Springfield, Missouri. He got it.
Others tried slashing their wrists or throats. One man, Joseph Wutke, sentenced to life for killing his father, succeeded—his throat found slit ear to ear. Officially, it was done with a pencil sharpener. I suspect a razor blade.” End quote.
After three years among America’s most dangerous prisoners, Moxon concluded that the breeding ground for criminality was county jails.
“There, young first offenders are thrown in with career criminals. In weeks, they learn how to “beat” charges, who the crooked lawyers are, and how to run a racket. It’s a school for crime—unregulated, unsupervised, and devastating.”
Moxon urged, “Reform the broken system that churns out criminals by the thousands. Do this, and we will have no need for a place like Alcatraz.”
Two years later, the most powerful lawman in the country stood on Alcatraz Island and looked into the heart of its stone belly.
Attorney General Frank Murphy had seen enough. "A horror spot," he called it. Not just a prison, but something darker, something he believed had no place in a civilized society. He urged for its immediate closure, for a new prison to take its place. But nothing came of it. Not for another twenty-five years.
Even with all of Murphy's weight behind the idea, Alcatraz remained. The rock didn’t budge. Because inside, the men it held weren’t just criminals. They were the end of the line.
In May of 1946, a riot erupted inside Alcatraz.
A bank robber from Kentucky named Bernard Paul Coy, who was serving out a twenty-six-year sentence on The Rock for committing a holdup using a sawed-off shotgun, masterminded the escape plan with five accomplices.
They overpowered a guard in a tower and took his machine gun.
Sirens sounded an alarm. The Battle of Alcatraz ensued.
Inmates captured nine guards and opened the doors on a cellblock.
Convicts raided the prison arsenal, seizing enough ammunition to last them forty days.
A veteran guard was riddled by the convict's machine gun fire and died. Others were critically wounded.
The warden called in the Marines, the Navy, police boats and doctors to help.
Searchlights from boats and the shore focused on the prison to spot any inmates trying to escape.
Guards crouched beneath windows of the main cellhouse as they sprayed bullets inside.
Large crowds gathered on the shoreline and on San Francisco’s Telegraph Hill. They watched in disbelief.
The three-day siege ended when Marines stormed the cellhouse with grenades.
Convict Coy was found dead wearing a guard’s uniform.
Two of his accomplices were executed together in the Gas Chamber at San Quentin for their role in the murder of Officer William Miller.
One year later, in August 1947, a reporter was allowed to walk through the steel gate of D Block on Alcatraz.
He entered with the assistant warden, the captain of the guard, a lieutenant, and two armed officers.
They walked down a whitewashed corridor that echoed every footstep. They passed through a narrow gate that locked shut behind them.
The sun pierced through the barred windows, but it didn’t warm the place.
The newspaper reporter told his readers that the corridor felt like a holdover from the Black Hole of Calcutta—damp, dark, claustrophobic. Inside the cells, men stared silently at their observers, some shouting curses that bounced off the concrete walls. Others just stared. Huddled in the gloom.
This was Alcatraz’s Alcatraz. The section of the federal prison system reserved for its most unmanageable inmates. D Block.
There were 258 men in the notorious cell block. Twenty-eight of them were so dangerous that they were confined away from the others in D Block.
They never worked. Their food was brought in. They were let out only twice a week to exercise in a tiny, barred-in yard. And only for a short time.
Some had killed more than once. Some had committed murder inside prison walls.
According to prison officials, they could not be trusted for a second outside their cells. Tools couldn’t be placed near them. They had torn steel lockers from walls, mutilated other inmates, and in some cases, shown a willingness to kill guards. The prison didn't try to rehabilitate them. It tried to contain them.
In a cell stood a man under observation. His case history, officials said, was a blueprint of violence. A life made up of escape attempts, crimes, and failed reform.
At fourteen years of age, he used a toy pistol to pull a holdup.
He was sent to reform school and graduated as a hardened criminal.
When he was 30 years old, the inmate staged his first successful escape from a state prison in Colorado.
He was captured and later paroled.
In 1941, he was convicted of a spectacular train robbery and sentenced to twenty years.
He was sent to a federal prison and nearly killed a Federal officer.
He escaped and eluded pursuit for several years but was eventually apprehended.
Authorities sent him to Alcatraz.
One of the more imaginative escape attempts on record may have come in 1945, when inmate John K. Giles executed a scheme built on patience and precision.
Piece by piece, he assembled a complete Army staff sergeant’s uniform—even the socks matched regulation issue.
When the day came, Giles blended into the bustle of an Army launch making its routine stop at Alcatraz. He marched aboard and took his place beside General Frank M. Coe, a regular visitor to the island. As the launch pulled away toward Angel Island, Giles stood at the rail in full view, posing as just another soldier in transit.
But precision works both ways. A headcount on deck revealed one too many. A radio call flashed ahead. By the time the launch docked at Angel Island, the Army was waiting. The extra soldier was quickly identified, and the phony sergeant was back in custody before he ever touched land.
In 1949, Congress considered closing Alcatraz. It was too costly to operate.
Eight dollars a day to maintain each inmate, compared to three dollars in other federal prisons.
All water had to be transported by barge from the mainland. Even soil had to be shipped to the Rock if a warden decided to raise a few flowers or vegetables.
But the federal government would have to open a “maximum security block” in other prisons where incorrigible prisoners would be kept safely and apart from other inmates.
Supporters believed that all hardened criminals live in mortal fear of winding up on Alcatraz.
So Alcatraz remained open.
Four years later, the federal prison director warned Congress that the Rock was caving in and needed four million dollars in repairs.
The walls were full of cracks. Its plumbing system was rotten. The saltwater ocean spray eroded electrical conduits, water pipes, and steel girders with rust.
But prison officials could not imagine an institution on the mainland that would be as escape-proof.
Congress opted for the status quo.
In July of 1956, a newspaper story reaffirmed that Alcatraz was still the escape-proof Rock.
The story read, “ The icy bay surf clutched at him. In the distance, the winking lights of San Francisco beckoned, promising many things.
This was the scene and the lure on a recent night before the salt-reddened eyes of Floyd P. Wilson, 41 years old, who killed a man in 1947 in an attempt to rob a store in Washington, D.C.
Wilson, a life-termer, was standing on a tiny beach on the boulder-strewn shore of Alcatraz, a springboard to freedom dreamed of almost constantly but seldom attained by escape-minded convicts on the ‘unbeatable Rock.’
The waterway to the mainland was open at long last. Only one devastating fact caused him to hesitate: he was not a good swimmer.
Yet he stood there contemplating escape across a water barrier that for 22 years has defeated escape attempts by men more violent than Wilson.
For eleven and a half hours he struggled vainly to summon up the courage to brave the cold water and strike out for the mainland despite his handicap. Success would have made him the first convict to shatter the escape-proof reputation of America’s toughest prison.
In the end, he was caught in the probing light beams of a guard search force and hauled dripping wet from his surf-battered hiding place. Failure was complete. Still another convict didn’t make it and the Alcatraz reputation remained unblemished.” End quote.
The most famous inmate on Alcatraz was not the man he was made out to be. Robert Stroud—known to the public as the “Birdman of Alcatraz”—never kept a single bird on the island. And he bore no resemblance to the soft-spoken figure portrayed by Burt Lancaster on film.
Stroud was a lifer, not a legend. He began his time behind bars in 1909 with a manslaughter conviction at McNeil Island in Washington. After assaulting a fellow prisoner, he was transferred to Leavenworth.
There, in 1916, he stabbed and killed a guard. A jury convicted him of first-degree murder and sentenced him to hang. His mother intervened. Her plea reached the White House. President Woodrow Wilson commuted his sentence to life in prison without parole in 1920.
Stroud spent three decades at Leavenworth in segregation. During that time, he studied birds. He raised canaries and wrote books on avian diseases. But the work wasn’t as innocent as it seemed. Prison officials found contraband hidden inside the cages. Equipment meant for bird research had been repurposed for brewing alcohol. What began as a scientific outlet turned into a security threat.
In 1942, Stroud was sent to Alcatraz. He would never leave the federal prison system again. Six years in D Block. Eleven in the prison hospital. In 1959, he was moved to the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri. He died there four years later.
The 1962 movie, Birdman of Alcatraz, was released during the last year of his life. It was a fictionalized version of the Birdman of Alcatraz book published in 1956.
Stroud was not permitted to see the movie in which Burt Lancaster portrayed him as a mild-mannered and humane individual.
"Birdman of Alcatraz" later earned Lancaster an Academy Award nomination for best actor.
One month prior to the release of the movie, three convicted bank robbers escaped from Alcatraz on an improvised rubber raft.
The leader of the escapees was Frank Morris, who had arrived at Alcatraz in January 1960 after convictions for bank robbery, burglary, and other crimes and repeated attempts to escape various prisons.
Later that year, a convict by the name of John Anglin was sent to Alcatraz, followed by his brother Clarence in early 1961. All three knew each other from previous stints in prison.
Assigned to adjoining cells, they began hatching a plan to escape. Morris, known for his intelligence, took the lead in the planning.
They used crude tools to burrow through walls in their cells. One of the most inventive was a makeshift drill powered by the motor from a broken vacuum cleaner. With it, they drilled tight clusters of holes around the air vents at the backs of their cells. Each man removed the metal grates piece by piece until the entire section of the wall could be lifted out. Then they covered the openings with whatever scraps they could find—a suitcase, cardboard, anything that might pass a casual glance.
Behind those cell walls was a hidden corridor—a utility passage unmonitored by guards. There, shielded from daily counts, they climbed to the top of the cell block. Above the cells, inside the building’s rafters, they built a workshop. By night, they worked in shifts. One was always on the lookout, peering through a handmade periscope rigged from discarded materials.
The escape tools took shape slowly. More than fifty raincoats were gathered or stolen, then stitched into life preservers and a six-by-fourteen-foot rubber raft. They sealed the seams using steam pipes to simulate vulcanization—an idea lifted from old magazines found in their cells. They made wooden paddles and converted a musical instrument into a hand pump to inflate the raft.
They also studied the building itself. The ceiling stood thirty feet high, but a network of pipes led them upward. Eventually, they reached a ventilator at the top of the shaft and pried it open. To avoid detection, they rigged it back in place with a bolt carved from soap.
By the night of June 11, 1962, the plan was set.
They moved quickly. Down the corridor. Up the pipes. Through the shaft. Onto the roof. From there, they descended the bakery smokestack at the rear of the building, scaled the perimeter fence, and crept to the northeast edge of the island. There, under the cover of darkness, they launched their handmade raft into San Francisco Bay.
When guards conducted the routine bed check the next morning, they discovered that the inmates were missing.
The night guards had been fooled into assuming the inmates were asleep. Each bed contained cleverly molded dummy heads made of plaster, flesh-tone paint, and real human hair, with the torsos covered by blankets.
What happened next remains a mystery.
Some paddle-like pieces of wood and bits of a rubber inner tube were found in the water.
A homemade life vest was also discovered washed up on Rodeo Beach, miles away from Alcatraz on the Pacific Ocean front.
But extensive searches did not turn up any other items in the area.
After seventeen years, the FBI officially closed its case on December 31, 1979. The Bureau transferred it to the United States Marshals Service, which continues to investigate in the unlikely event the trio is still alive.
With their disappearance into the cold waters of the bay, Alcatraz lost the one claim it had always held above all others—its reputation as escape-proof was gone.
Hollywood fictionalized the escape in 1979 with the movie “Escape From Alcatraz” starring Clint Eastwood. It was a sympathetic portrayal of the escapees and the dehumanization of the penal system.
Before Alcatraz was shut down in 1963, two more bank robbers escaped because of Alcatraz’s rundown and eroded condition.
They used kitchen cleaner and a banjo string to saw through a bar. One convict was picked up on a rock one hundred yards from the prison.
The other 35-year-old inmate was found near death on the rocky shore beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. He had worn an improvised life jacket made of plastic bags to swim the swift tides and cold water.
On March 21, 1963, the gates of Alcatraz closed for good, ending twenty-nine years of operation. The prison had simply become too expensive to maintain.
Keeping the island running required an estimated three to five million dollars in critical repairs alone, just to make the place habitable.
That didn’t include the staggering daily costs. By 1959, it cost ten dollars and ten cents per inmate per day to operate Alcatraz—more than triple the three dollars per inmate at the Atlanta federal penitentiary.
The same isolation that once made Alcatraz an ideal prison made it financially unsustainable. Everything—food, fuel, supplies, and nearly a million gallons of fresh water each week—had to be delivered by boat.
In the end, the government ran the numbers and reached a simple conclusion: it was cheaper to build something new than to keep Alcatraz afloat.
Alcatraz was closed after 29 years of incarcerating the nation’s most dangerous inmates.
According to the Bureau of Prisons, between 1934 and 1963, thirty-six men, including two who tried to escape twice, were involved in fourteen separate escape attempts. Of these, twenty-three were caught, six were shot and killed during their escape, and two drowned.
After the prison closed, Alcatraz was basically abandoned. In 1969, a group of Native American activists called the Indians of All Tribes occupied Alcatraz for 19 months. They used their act of civil disobedience to illustrate the troubles faced by Native Americans.
Alcatraz opened to the public in 1973 and remains a park, museum, and bird sanctuary operated by the National Park Service.
Alcatraz Island was listed as a National Historic Landmark in 1986 and hosts nearly one and a half million visitors a year.
Robert Riggs
Christina Vidovich recently toured Alcatraz with her ten-year-old son.
It was her second trip to what has been called Devils Island.
Christina Vidovich
So you have to book your tickets in advance for the tour to Alcatraz Island, and you meet in San Francisco at the wharf, and you hop on the ferry boat, and you're already getting that sense of very stark, very cold feeling, even though the bay is absolutely beautiful sailboats, but as the buildings and the mainland is getting further and further in, there is that haunting feeling coming into the island.
Robert Riggs
And are you thinking about, Oh, my God, what did what would it have been like to try to escape and swim out of here? And you know, there are three men who might have done it,
Christina Vidovich
Yes, and today, you can still find the holes where they had in the cells and covered them up, including the heads that they made to make it look as if they were still there, where they took their own cut hair to fake someone sleeping in their bed, because they had art time at Alcatraz, and that was one of the activities. So somehow they were smuggling making these heads or saying, Oh, it's just an art project.
Robert Riggs
And what were the conditions of the place? Could you imagine reopening it today as a prison?
Christina Vidovich
Absolutely not. And the reason is it reminds me of a school house that I went to, or excuse me, it reminds me of a school house that I started first and second grade in and they had to tear it down because the building was falling apart. Here's something built in the 1930s it still has that smell of that old institution, the old hospitals, the old school buildings that have now mostly been torn down in the United States, where they don't stand the cells in themselves don't have the toilets, the sinks anymore. They're completely missing everything, the beds that folded down. It's just not, just not. It needs so much renovation to get to a place of anything inhabitable.
Robert Riggs
Was there a particular inmate from history that you found most interesting?
Christina Vidovich
The bird man, the bird man and how sinister he felt to the other prisoners when he would whistle. So as you walk around Alcatraz, they give you a headset so you can get a feel of each of the avenues and who was staying in those avenues and in those cells. And I love that piece of the history, because you just have that moment of the voice over and the sounds of what it would have been as your imagination is allowed to roam and saying, what would it be like in this six by 10 cell day in, day out, only allowed out for meal time or the courtyard. What was interesting about visiting the courtyard? They would play cards out there. They were allowed to do sports in the courtyard, and they would stay no matter what the weather was, as long as they could to be out in the courtyard and behaved so they didn't have to go and sit inside their cells all day long. You know, getting their good behavior to enjoy something like that.
Robert Riggs
Describe the physical structure of the place, the state of deterioration.
Christina Vidovich
Sure. So to get up to the prison itself, you have to go through the old guard house, up the hill and into a basement level area, which was where the showers were, where they would leave all their clothes. And it's a simple room. There's nothing in it left except the people who are greeting you and giving you the headsets to walk around. Mean the paint is chipped. It's old tiles left. The cracked tiles, the cracked toilets that are still remaining, half sinks, no mirrors where there once were mirrors on the walls. It's just It reminds me of a house that someone hasn't lived in, and you've cleaned out the spider webs and go now, what is something from a bad HGTV house rescue show?
Robert Riggs
And so when you heard the President wanted to reopen it after you visited there twice. What did you think?
Christina Vidovich
I think that's absolutely ludicrous. It is not in any shape for inhabitation of any kind. As a tourist, yes, you can go and see, and you're guided through the safe areas. But as an actual prison, there is too much work that needs to be done to make it inhabitable, even for the worst criminal, just simple humanity, to live inside a space like that.
Robert Riggs
And would you go back?
Christina Vidovich
I find it fascinating to go back for me, I love seeing history when I'm actually in a place to get a real sense, to read the signs, to look at the pictures, to have a moment standing in the shoes of where someone else was standing, and what kind of life were they living. So I. From a tourist point of view, I think Alcatraz is an amazing historical place to visit that the history from a military prison to the Native Americans taking over at later times, the whole history of the gangsters and the criminals who are there is so integral to our criminal system and the way that things are run from the past to how they're still run today. So as a tourist, historically, I think it's a great place to be, and I would definitely go back.
Robert Riggs
Now in the 21st Century, the federal prison system locks away its most dangerous offenders inside ADX Florence in Colorado.
It is the nation’s only supermax, known as the “Alcatraz of the Rockies.”
I’ve walked the echoing corridors of Texas administrative segregation units, which are prisons inside prisons. Reserved for the worst of the worst.
The isolation is so complete, even Alcatraz would blink.
The Rock is a ghost of its past.
Could this relic of punishment ever serve its purpose again?
Or is the idea of reopening Alcatraz just a fantasy clinging to rusted bars and fading myths?
This is Robert Riggs, reporting for the True Crime Reporter® Podcast.
