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Nov 4, 2020 · According to Crime Magazine, the prison's worst-behaved were sent to D Block, which contained 42 cells featuring varying degrees of punishment. The worst of these was most definitely the Strip Cell. Here prisoners were completely deprived of all sensory stimuli and anything resembling human comfort.
- Cody Copeland
The five cells of "The Hole" had nothing but a sink and toilet; the very worst cell was the final cell, nicknamed "The Oriental" or "Strip Cell", which contained nothing but a hole in the floor as a toilet, and in which prisoners would often be confined naked with nothing else for two days.
- The Hopi Nineteen
- Frank Lucas Bolt
- Al Capone
- Robert Stroud, A.K.A. The 'Bird Man' of Alcatraz
- Morton Sobell
- Robert Lipscomb
- Ellsworth 'Bumpy' Johnson
In 1894, when Alcatraz was still operating as a military prison, the U.S. government arrested 19 Hopi men for refusing to send their children to American assimilation boarding schoolsalmost 1,000 miles away from their reservation in Oraibi, Arizona. From the late 19th century well into the 20th, the federal government, following a policy of “save t...
Little has been documented about Alcatraz’s LGBTQ+ prisoners, but gay men did play a role in the infamous prison. In fact, it was a queer man, Frank Lucas Bolt, who served as the prison’s first official inmate. Bolt was serving in the U.S. Army in Panama when he was convicted of sodomy in 1932 and sent to serve time at a Pacific area military priso...
For notorious Chicago-based mobster Al Capone, doing hard time before Alcatraz was rarely that hard. During earlier stints in Atlanta and other prisons, Capone had recruited guards to work on his payroll and enjoyed special privileges—from home-cooked meals and cushy bedding to unlimited access to the warden. That all stopped when Capone arrived at...
By the time Robert Stroud was transferred to Alcatraz in 1942, he had already established himself as one of the most dangerous—and notorious—prisoners in America, with a rap sheet already decades long. Stroud first entered the penitentiary system more than 30 years earlier, in 1909, when he was convicted of murder and imprisoned in Washington State...
At the height of the Cold War, Morton Sobell was sent to Alcatraz after being convicted, alongside Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, of espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union. Though nailed for conspiracy, Sobell wasn’t convicted of providing the Soviet Union with stolen nuclear secrets like the Rosenbergs. Still, FBI DirectorHoovercalled Sobell’s offen...
By the time Robert Lipscomb arrived at Alcatraz in 1954, the African American Cleveland native had spent most of his adult life in midwestern prisons for auto theft and counterfeiting. Suffering from paranoia, depression and an abusive childhood, Lipscomb was declared psychotic and institutionalized by the age of nine. A psychiatric evaluation, how...
Infamous Harlem crime boss Ellsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson was another of the many oft-overlooked Black inmates housed on the Rock. Johnson came to Alcatraz in 1952, at the height of his reign as the so-called “Godfather of Harlem,” after he was sentenced to a 15-year stint for a drug conspiracy conviction. Johnson served the majority of that sen...
- Aaron Randle
- 11 min
Jan 28, 2021 · The cells remained primitive and lacked privacy. African-American prisoners were segregated from the rest of the prison population due to the prevalence of racial prejudice and physical abuse among prisoners. D-Block housed the worst inmates in solitary confinement.
- Inmate #85: Al 'Scarface' Capone. Conviction: Tax evasion. Time Served at Alcatraz: 5 years (1934–1939) Post-Term: mental illness, death from syphilis. By the time Al Capone arrived at Alcatraz on the morning of August 22, 1934, he was past his peak as a crime kingpin.
- Inmate #110: Roy Gardner. Conviction: Armed robbery. Time Served at Alcatraz: 2 years (1934–1936) Post-Term: author, suicide. Alcatraz was repurposed by the federal government from a military prison to a general federal prison in 1933 expressly to deal with criminals like Roy G. Gardner, the man who was nicknamed “King of the Escape Artists.”
- Inmate #117: George 'Machine Gun' Kelly. Conviction: Kidnapping. Time Served at Alcatraz: 17 years (1934–1951) Post-Term: died of a heart attack in jail. It couldn’t be said that many of the criminals who ended up in Alcatraz were from good families, but Machine Gun Kelly was raised in a well-off Memphis household and even attended some college.
- Inmate #325: Alvin 'Creepy' Karpis. Conviction: Kidnapping. Time Served at Alcatraz: 26 years (1936–1962) Post-Term: author, pill overdose. Like "Machine Gun" Kelly, Alvin Francis Karpowicz saw kidnapping as an easier way to make large sums of money than bank robbing.
Feb 27, 2014 · Perched on a rocky outcrop in the middle of San Francisco Bay, from the 1930s to the 1960s the Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary was reserved for the "worst of the worst". A who's who of the criminal...
Feb 2, 2022 · Alcatraz had 336 cells measuring 5 feet by 9 feet, each with a cot, a basin, and a toilet. According to Jim Quillen, an inmate from 1942, the toilet had no seat and the washbasin had only a cold water tap. The cells in Block D were larger, but that’s because they were used solitary confinement cells.
