The secrets of ‘horrible and beautiful' Alcatraz – including its 14 escape attempts

Yahoo

13-05-2025

If the world has learnt anything during the past decade, it is to take the words of the 45th and now 47th president of the United States with a modicum of sodium chloride. Wild statements come, outlandish pronouncements go, and in the giddy aftermath, everyone from political commentators to social media posters piles into the conversation.
This was entirely the case last week when – without much in the way of warning – Donald Trump floated the idea of reopening Alcatraz as a fully functioning prison, more than 60 years after the infamous Californian landmark ceased to fulfil this purpose.
Was he serious? As with many of Trump's more impulsive utterances, it is difficult to say. But if you sift through the details, there is a kernel of accuracy to the president's musings.
In follow-up comments to his original Truth Social post, he spoke of Alcatraz – almost admiringly – as a location which 'represents something very strong, very powerful'. It is, he continued, 'something that is both horrible and beautiful – and strong and miserable'.
Few people who have made the 1.25-mile crossing to 'The Rock' from the San Francisco waterfront would dispute the veracity of those sentences. And there have been plenty of visitors to Alcatraz – it attracts around 1.2 million sightseers per year – in the 53 years since it was turned into a museum, in 1972. 'Horrible and beautiful'? That's the gist of it.
I know this well, because I have been one of those 1.2 million annual tourists – hopping onto a boat at Pier 33, and making the 15-minute trip out into San Francisco Bay. Although relatively short, it is a journey that gives you time to think – that swarthy lump of stone looming incrementally larger with every chug of the engine; the thick walls that encompass the prison seeming to grow higher and heavier with every advancing yard.
I can only assume that a similar thought process – albeit one of a far more pessimistic hue – went through the minds of those who were brought this way between 1934 and 1963.
For all its notoriety, Alcatraz was only a federal prison for 29 years (the buildings on the island began life in 1859 as a fort; this became a military prison in the 1860s). But its legend has transcended this comparatively brief timespan 'thanks' to the identities of some of the men who were incarcerated within it. It was, in part, a jailhouse of last resort, holding prisoners who had proved disruptive elsewhere in the system. It also became – the main source of its dark fame here in the 21st century – a storage space for major figures of organised crime; among them Chicago mobster Al Capone (who was kept in its cells from 1934 to 1939) and Boston crimelord James 'Whitey' Bulger (who arrived in 1959).
Perhaps these hardened villains looked at those walls as the boat docked, and shrugged. And perhaps they didn't. Alcatraz wears its grim, unwelcoming face without disguise. I remember finding it – to no great surprise – a bleak and desperate outpost, the long rows of cells, all concrete floors and metal bars, retaining their oppressive ambience more than half a century on from their retirement. But it was the combination of isolation and proximity that I found most discomforting. You can see the Golden Gate Bridge from the building's upper windows. You can see the city in motion as well – its lights twinkling on the shore.
Little wonder that so many jailbirds, able to glimpse freedom at such tantalisingly close quarters, tried to make a break for it. Over those 29 years, there were 14 escape attempts, involving 36 prisoners. None of them, officially, managed the supposedly impossible. On the night of June 11 1962, three inmates – Frank Morris, plus brothers John and Clarence Anglin; all convicted bank robbers – made it beyond the walls, having left papier-mâché heads in their beds, and wormed their way to the outside via ventilation ducts. They were never seen again. As of a formal report in 1979, the FBI considers all three men to have gone to their deaths in the exhausting currents and cold depths which surround the island.
Certainly, this enforced solitude – coupled with that taunting nearness of everyday metropolitan life – was a compelling reason as to why Alcatraz was not a place you would have wished to call 'home'. In an excellent interview with the BBC, published this week, Charlie Hopkins – an armed robber who, now aged 93, is believed to be the last surviving Alcatraz alumnus – has recounted his stint on the island as a case of near-silence which spoke volumes. All you could hear during the night, he recalls, was the sound of ships' whistles, out on the wider water. 'Now, that's a lonely sound,' he adds. 'It reminds you of Hank Williams singing that song: 'I'm so lonesome I could cry'.'
Hopkins, a Trump supporter, does not believe that the plan to return Alcatraz to its former role will amount to much – arguing, instead, that the president is trying to 'get a point across to the public' about the importance of law and order. He also cites the obvious problems, all of which contributed to the prison's closure in 1963, that would realistically preclude its reopening: the operating costs (even six decades ago, it was three times more expensive to run than any other prison in the US system, with everything, including all food, having to be shipped to the island); its lack of modern facilities ('back then, the sewage went into the ocean; they'd have to come up with another way of handling that'). There is also the small matter of the money that would be lost: Alcatraz brings a reported $60 million (£45 million) in revenue into the National Park System's coffers every year.
Yet the almost soundless seclusion that Hopkins describes so poetically does tap into Trump's notion of Alcatraz as 'horrible and beautiful'. It is a desolate chunk of sandstone, either scorched by the Californian sun or lost in the mists which roll in off the Pacific, but spectacular in its vacuum in either guise – even if the stern example it sets is better suited to the past perspective of tourism, rather than the punishments of the present.
Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.