Video: 'Alcatraz Closes - 1963 | Today In History | 21 Mar 17'
(Thursday, March 21, 1963) — The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, a maximum security federal prison on Alcatraz Island, 1.25 miles off the coast of San Francisco, California, closed today as the last of 27 of the island prison’s 260-inmate population were removed and transferred to other institutions.
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The site of a fort since the 1850s, the main prison building was built in 1910–1912 as a United States Army military prison.
The U.S. Department of Justice acquired the United States Disciplinary Barracks, Pacific Branch, on Alcatraz on Oct. 12, 1933.
The island became adapted and used as a prison of the Federal Bureau of Prisons in August 1934 after the buildings were modernized and security increased. Given this high security and the island’s location in the cold waters and strong currents of San Francisco Bay, prison operators believed Alcatraz to be escape-proof and America’s strongest prison.
Video: 'Alcatraz 1934-1977 Part 5 of 6' (Mar. 21, 1963, at 3:09)
A 1959 report, however, indicated that the facility was over three times more expensive to run than the average American prison; $10 per prisoner per day compared to $3 in most other prisons.
The problem was made worse by the buildings’ structural deterioration from exposure to salt spray, which would require $5 million to fix. Major repairs began in 1958, but by 1961 engineers considered the prison a lost cause.
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy submitted plans for a new maximum-security institution in Marion, Illinois.
Video: 'National Geographic - Alcatraz: No Way Out'
An escape from Alcatraz in June 1962 led to acrimonious investigations. Combined with the major structural problems and expensive operation, this led to its today’s closure.
The final Bureau of Prisons report said of Alcatraz: “The institution served an important purpose in taking the strain off the older and greatly overcrowded institutions in Atlanta, Leavenworth, and McNeil Island since it enabled us to move to the smaller, closely guarded institution for the escape artists, the big-time racketeers, the inveterate connivers and those who needed protection from other groups.”
The former prison and island are now a museum. It is one of San Francisco’s major tourist attractions drawing in some 1.5 million visitors annually (2010).
