Welcome to the cell block. After serving as a military base and military prison from 1850 to 1932, Alcatraz became a federal prison, specifically to hold prisoners who were too troublesome to be held elsewhere. “Break the rules and you go to prison, break the prison rules and you go to Alcatraz.>”
Each new prisoner received a cell with a mattress, pillow, blanket, and the rules and regulations book. (The toilet is behind the bed, next to the sink.) Some of the more notable regulations were:
Regulation 5: You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter, and medical attention. Anything else you get is a privilege.
Regulation 19: Trading, gambling, selling, giving, or loaning your personal property or your government issue items or services, or contraband of any kind, is a serious offense.
Regulation 21: You are required to work at whatever you are told to do.
Regulation 25: You are not allowed to have money of any kind in your possession while in this institution. Use of cigarettes or other items as “jail money” is forbidden.
Regulation 30: Loud talking, shouting, whistling, singing or other unnecessary noises are not permitted.
And so on. With a little time, the prisoner could make his cell nice and cozy, with the allowable items as shown in the diagram:
On the audio tour, we heard about some of the more notable residents (I did not know, for example, that Al Capone went crazy from syphilis, nor did I know that the Birdman of Alcatraz did not actually have any birds at Alcatraz; he also was something of a sociopath). One of the better stories was that of three men who escaped. Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin engineered an escape in 1962, fashioning crude tools to dig out the cement around their air vents, climbing into the corridor that ran between the cell blocks and up to the roof, and using a modified musical instrument to inflate a raft they’d constructed from stolen raincoats. They even built fake heads to lay on their pillows so their absences wouldn’t be immediately noticed. The story is here.
The three were never found; the likeliest outcome was that they drowned trying to swim the frigid water and strong current of the bay. According to a fourth member of the gang who was unable to get his air vent grill loose in time, the plan was to steal clothes and a car upon reaching land; however, no thefts of that nature were reported in the days following the escape. Moreover, some of the prisoners’ personal effects and pieces of raft washed up in the bay.
For our part, we took the ferry back.
Next: Ghost town.