A press photo from 1933, showing an officer posing next to an abandoned cannon on the parade ground wall. The Military had already decided to close the prison due to the high cost of operation and ownership shifted to the Department of Justice.

J. Edgar Hoover, then the Assistant Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, waged a public war against the American gangster. Hoover is seen here (center) in a public campaign photograph publicizing the FBI’s mission against crime.

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary

You are entitled to food, clothing, shelter and medical attention.

Anything else that you get is a privilege.

- Alcatraz Inmate Regulations, Rule # 5

Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary

Alcatraz would soon come to play a major role in the federal government’s overdue response to organized crime. If gangsters such as Al Capone and Machine Gun Kelly were the symbol of the nation’s lawlessness, then Alcatraz would be the national symbol for punishing the lawless. In this respect, gangsters and Alcatraz were perfect foils in a common tragedy – two iconic extremes drawn together on an unavoidable collision course. Thanks to the celebrity status of the American gangster, the stage was set for the birth of a unique detention concept.

Aside from the military prison facilities, the federal government did not establish its own penitentiaries until 1891, so it was forced to incarcerate federally convicted inmates in state and local jails. In the late 1800’s, the number of federal prisoners housed in these institutions was quite significant. As an example, in January of 1877, twenty-nine of the fifty-two inmates confined at Greystone, the Alameda County Jail located in Pleasanton, California, were federal convicts. But in 1887 the situation changed, as the United States Congress made it illegal for states to hire or contract out the labor of federal prisoners housed in their institutions. Up to this point, the federal inmates had cost the states little or nothing, since the prisons benefited financially from inmate labor. To offset operating costs after the new laws came into force, state facilities began charging daily fees for maintaining the incarceration of each inmate. In the early 1900’s, these charges ran from thirty to fifty cents a day, per inmate.

In 1891, Congress had authorized construction of three federal prisons. The first of these would be Fort Leavenworth, in Kansas. Leavenworth had originally been a military fortress and it was taken over by the Department of Justice in 1895. A second federal prison opened in Atlanta in 1902, and the third would be a converted territorial jail on McNeil Island in Washington’s Puget Sound. On May 27, 1930, Congress authorized the establishment of a Federal Bureau of Prisons within the Department of Justice:

It is hereby declared to be the policy of the Congress that the said institutions be so planned and limited in size as to facilitate the development of an integrated Federal Penal and Correctional System which will assure the proper classification and segregation of federal prisoners according to their character, the nature of the crime they have committed, their mental condition and such other factors as should be taken into consideration in providing an individualized system of discipline, care, and treatment of the persons committed to such institutions.

On October 12 1933, the Justice Department announced plans to take over Alcatraz as a federal prison. Alcatraz was officially named as a federal penitentiary on January 1, 1934, during a time of severe economic depression. As a federal “super-prison,” Alcatraz would serve the dual purpose of incarcerating the nation’s most notorious criminals in a harsh, disciplined environment, and acting as a visible warning to the new brand of criminal, that the federal government meant business. It was designed as a maximum security / minimum privilege institution. The Bureau established a strict policy of controlling every piece of information regarding prisoners that was released to the press. Part of the punishment for famous inmates would be never allowing them to see their names in print again. Alcatraz would serve to completely isolate the inmates from the public, and would maintain firm control of every aspect of their daily lives.

Break the laws of society and you go to prison, break the prison-rules and you go to Alcatraz.

The citizens of San Francisco bitterly resented the Bureau’s decision to concentrate the nation’s worst criminals in the middle of the scenic San Francisco Bay. Several public campaigns were led to block this transition, but all were unsuccessful. The Department of Justice called upon patriotic Americans to support the nation’s war against crime through the establishment of Alcatraz. The Department also assured the residents that the prison would be designed as an escape-proof fortress, and that this would completely eliminate any threat that might be posed by escaped prisoners. The project was led by Sanford Bates, Director of the Federal Prisons, James V. Bennett, Assistant Director, and Attorney General Homer Cummings, assisted by soon-to-be Warden of Alcatraz James A. Johnston, and each of these men had a hand in the design concept.

James A. Johnston, the first appointed warden of Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary.

Johnston would later write in his 1949 memoir entitled Alcatraz and the Men Who Live There:

I assumed office on January 2, 1934. Hour after hour, day after day, I walked back and forth, up and down and around the island, from the dock to the administration building, from the office to the powerhouse, powerhouse to the shops, shops to the barracks, into the basements, up on the roofs, across the yards, through the tunnels: I sent more suggestions to Washington...

One of the nation’s foremost security experts, Robert Burge, was commissioned to design a prison that was escape-proof as well as be outwardly forbidding. Burge’s basic concept would be to fully restrict the movements of all inmates. No longer would prisoners have the right of entry to any part of the island. They would be restricted primarily to the main cellhouse building and passage to the Industries would be equally controlled. The main entrance was securely designed so that anyone entering would have to pass through several gates, with access controlled by an officer stationed in the Armory. The Armory would be a control center that oversaw all movements of people leaving or entering the cellblock. The duty officer could view the sallyport area through a two-inch-thick bulletproof rectangular glass portal, and the gates were controlled electronically. The sallyport also featured electronically manipulated sliding steel plates on the gate lock mechanisms which shielded the key slots. The Armory officer was the only person who had access to the slide panel. Once the shield was opened, the officer would need a key to open the first gate manually. There were then two more gates to pass through before entering the cellhouse. This would become the hallmark of Alcatraz: security safeguards set into layers upon layers of redundancies.