Browse Descriptions for: Alcatraz

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Rating: 0 | Votes: 0 | Date: 03/06/2026 13:30:00

Few prison sites in the world are as instantly recognisable as Alcatraz, the small rocky island in the middle of San Francisco Bay whose name has become shorthand for inescapable confinement. Originally a military fortification and Civil War-era detention site, the island opened as the United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island, in August 1934, conceived as a maximum-security, minimum-privilege federal prison to hold the most disruptive inmates from elsewhere in the federal system. The icy curr...