July 10, 2009: Alcatraz was a prison almost from the very beginning. In 1859, 11 soliders scheduled for confinement in the sally port basement arrived with the Fort's first permanent garrison. During the Civil War era, soliders convicted of desertion, theft, assault, rape, and murder; citizens accused of treason; and the crew of a Confederate ship were imprisoned here. The army also used Alcatraz as a place of incarceration for Hopi, Apache, and Modoc Indians captured during the various Indian wars of the mid- to late nineteenth century and for military convicts during the Spanish-American War (1898).

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the newly created Bureau of Prisons became interested in the island as a place for a high-profile, maximum-security facility. Transferred from the War Department to the Department of Justice, Alcatraz reopened in 1934 as a federal penitentiary. Of the 1,545 men who did time on Alcatraz, only a handful were notorious - among them, Al "Scarface" Capone, "Doc" Barker, Alvin "Creepy" Karpis, George "Machine Gun" Kelly, Floyd Hamilton, and Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz" (who actually conducted his famous bird studies when he was imprisoned at Leavenworth.) Most of the inmates were men who had proved to be problems in other prison populations - escape risks and troublemakers.

Of the 14 attempted federal prison-era escapes, the best known occurred in June 1962, when Frank Morris and brothers John and Clarence Anglin slipped into the water. They used raincoats as flotation devices and were presumably bound for San Francisco. Although their bodies were never found, they are assumed to have drowned. In total, 36 prisoners tried to escape the Rock; all but five were recaptured or otherwise accounted for.