An Afternoon on Alcatraz Island

I took a ferry over to Alcatraz Island today and learnt a little about its history as a military fort, prison, site of an American Indian occupation and its current incarnation, a national park. Initially, it doesn't seem so imposing when one hears that the original name was La Isla de los Alcatraces meaning the "Island of Pelicans" but it was creepy and the stories were horrible.

I was surprised to learn that many of the guards and their families had lived on the island also. The children who remember living there said it was lots of fun (they were hardly aware of the prison). When asked what she thought about living so close to all those murders, one woman commented that at least they knew where the bad people were. (I wonder what their dads were like though, it doesn't seem like they were very nice people.)

I also learnt about the escape attempts, from the most famous plan which lasted three days and ended with Marines shooting up the place, to a fellow who escaped out a window, decided it was too far to swim and then let himself back in through another window. (His life turned around when his daughter contacted him. He turned over a new leaf and was parolled after 20 years I think. Unimaginably, his daughter, who had moved her family to Oakland to be close to him, poisoned her husband and then she was sent to prison. The fellow married his former wife and they brought up the daughter's children.)

I learnt that after the Native Americans took over Alcatraz for 19 months from 1969-1971, President Nixon started to change the laws so that they were given their land back. "The underlying goals of the Indians on Alcatraz were to awaken the American public to the reality of the plight of the first Americans and to assert the need for Indian self-determination. As a result of the occupation, either directly or indirectly, the official government policy of termination of Indian tribes was ended and a policy of Indian self-determination became the official US government policy." (Before that, when the island was still a prison, Hopi men had been imprisoned there for refusing to send their children to government boarding school.)

I also learnt a bit about Al Capone and most interestingly, while the owner of dairy and meat factories, they were the first food producers to put used by dates on food when Capone became concerned about kids drinking sour milk! I also discovered that the prison was a silent prison. Inmates were only allowed to talk for three minutes during the morning and afternoon recreation yard periods and for two hours on weekends.

It was a really great day. The audio tour was very informative and compelling and the prison and prisoner stories fascinating. For such a little island though, there was a lot of walking. From the dock to the prison cells is a quarter of a mile walk, in the form of a snakey path up a very steep hill, equivalent to the height of a 13 storey building! But it gave us a breathtaking view of the bay, city and all the bridges and was definately worth doing.