Alcatraz Closes: The End of an Era

The last 27 prisoners left Alcatraz on March 21, 1963, and the most feared penitentiary in America went quiet. Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered the closure not because the island fortress had failed at its mission but because the saltwater corrosion eating its concrete walls made keeping it open absurdly expensive. Maintaining the facility cost three times more per inmate than any other federal prison. Alcatraz became a federal penitentiary in 1934, designed to house the prisoners other facilities could not handle. Al Capone, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, and Robert Stroud (the "Birdman of Alcatraz," though he was never allowed birds there) all served time on the island in San Francisco Bay. The 1.25-mile swim through frigid, current-swept water made escape virtually impossible. Of the 36 men who attempted it over 29 years, none were confirmed to have survived, though five remain officially missing. The most famous escape attempt came in June 1962, when Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin crawled through ventilation ducts they had widened with sharpened spoons, left papier-mache decoy heads in their beds, and disappeared into the bay on a makeshift raft. The FBI concluded they drowned, but no bodies were ever found. Six years after closing, a group of Native American activists occupied the island for 19 months, claiming it under an 1868 Sioux treaty. Today Alcatraz draws more than 1.5 million visitors annually as a national park, generating far more revenue as a tourist destination than it ever consumed as a prison.