alcatraz Essay -- essays research papers

An icon of power and strength, Alcatraz has become the single most recognizable symbol of American society. Situated in the San Francisco Bay, one can’t help but be drawn to the rocky shore, the dark walls, and the lone light tower sanding cold against a picturesque sunset imagining what it would have been like to be incarcerated in one of the world’s most infamous prisons. Discovered in 1775 by the Spanish explorer Juan Miguel de Ayala, La Isla de los Alcatraces was little more than a rock inhabited by a group of pelicans from which the island bears its name (Alcatraces meaning pelicans in Spanish). However, in 1847 the US government began to look at it as much more. Strategically placed at the mouth of the San Francisco Bay it was the perfect site for a military fort. By 1853 a state of the art military fortress was protecting the Western United States against foreign infiltration. In 1861, with outbreak of the Civil War, Alcatraz began receiving its first military prisoners. However, it wasn’t until 1898 and the Spanish- American War that the isolation of the island that made it an impregnable military installation also made it an inescapable prison. During this war the prisoner population jumped from 26 to 450. That number spiked again as civil prisoners were transferred from city jails after the famous 1906 earthquake. With the island becoming more and more a prison and less and less a military fort, a cell house was built in 1912. This is generally felt to be the p...