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.....

The largest natural island in San Francisco Bay, Angel Island rises steeply from the water just north of San Francisco and across a narrow channel from Tiburon, its tree-covered slopes and 788-foot Mount Caroline Livermore offering some of the most expansive views anywhere in the region. Long inhabited by the Coast Miwok people, the island was named in 1775 by the Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala, and over the next two centuries became, in turn, a Civil War-era army post, a quarantine stati.....