Finally: Alcatraz

posted at 11:27 pm
on Nov. 5, 2006

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Susie and I finally made it today to Alcatraz.  We’ve been trying to visit for years and year—but you have to buy tickets in advance, and, well, we nevr got our acts together.

But for my birthday, Susie gave me two tickets to Alcatraz co-inciding with our trip here, and I choo-choo-choosed her to go with me.

Again, photos will have to wait, but I have to say, it was a great tour.  It was a night tour, of which there aren’t many.  Instead of having about 2,000 people on the island at once, we had just 319, which meant there were many times when you could stand in a room or a hallway or a cell and be completely alone.

Which is damn creepy.

We also got to take a quick tour through the hospital wing, which is left much more close to its original conditions than the cells.

The history of Alcatraz isn’t just of the prison.  It’s basically a story of sentinals, of guarding, waiting and watching.  It was a fort protecting the mouth of the Bay from possible invasion in the late part of the 1800s.  It was a military prison, including of some prisoners of the Civil War, when Lincoln suspended habeus corpus.

After the prison was shut down (due to budget cuts, basically), the island was taken over by American Indians making a stand for publicity and to create a new colony.

In almost every phase of its existance, the island was basically a place where people were sent to wait, to watch, but not to do.  The island was never invaded; prison breaks were rare; the cannons were never fired in aggression.

Overall, the tour was very well done and interesting, but in a certain way, I was a disappointed.  For a supermax facility, it seemed so simple, so ordinary.  To keep the toughest criminals in America locked up and isolated, most of the guards didn’t even have guns.

Basically, all it had was a lot of tiny cells and heavy doors, and a very strict routine.  To keep these hardened criminals from escaping, the key seems to be: lock them up, and watch them constantly.

One other thing I found interesting: how many of them were in prison for relatively short spans: 10, 12, 14 years.  Nowadays, it seems like the worst criminals get prison sentences of 20, 30, 40 years.  Are criminals nowadays that much worse?

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