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any famous and vicious criminals spent years in Alcatraz. Unlike other prisons, they couldn’t get special treatment because of bribery or powerful connections. They had to do chores and sleep in small cells alone.

A hobby of most inmates was reading. The prisoners had access to a library of over 15,000 books and 75 magazines. Many had gotten into crime before they’d finished school, and had never had the time or education to read, until they were in jail.

There had other pastimes as well. Some of them started a band, each playing different instruments. Some wrote letters of apology to their victims, though, for one prisoner, he spent most of the letter venting about jail. The inmates also spoke with one another, boasting about their adventures.

Others became scientists. One inmate wrote a letter to the authorities, asking if he could do weather experiments at the south pole. They thought that he was trying to come up with a way to escape and they refused. Another studied birds in prison, researching them and even discovering a cure for certain diseases. In the prison where he had stayed before Alcatraz, he kept injured birds in his cell with him, healed them, and sold them to visitors. But it was messy and noisy and caused a lot of trouble for the prison. In Alcatraz, he wasn’t allowed to keep birds, but he was able to continue to study and write about them.

ESCAPE FROM ALCATRAZ!

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lcatraz was nearly impossible to escape from, but that didn’t stop inmates from trying! There were 14 separate escape attempts over the years, but most of them weren’t successful.

In one inmate’s attempt in 1945, he used his prison job in a creative way. He was in charge of unloading the ships that brought laundry from army bases. Over many shipments, he stole one piece of clothing at a time until he had an entire army uniform. Then he hid under the dock, put on the uniform, and jumped onto a boat that was leaving. Unfortunately, officers noticed that the inmate was gone, and they radioed the ship to return to Alcatraz.

Another inmate spent most of 1962 loosening a bar in a storage room window. He covered himself with grease so that he could squeeze through the opening and swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco. He was so tired after his swim that he collapsed on a pile of rocks near the Golden Gate Bridge and slept until he was discovered an hour later and brought back to Alcatraz.

THE SINGULAR SUCCESSFUL TRIO

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hree inmates made a particularly complicated and daring escape: John Anglin, Clarence Anglin, and Frank Morris. They spent months stealing items from around the prison and turning them into drills and other tools (like the motor from a broken vacuum cleaner). Carefully, they drilled holes around the air vents at the back of their cells, so that part of the wall could be removed. They built rubber rafts and life preservers out of more than 50 raincoats. Finally, they used plaster, paint, and real hair to create fake heads.

Their room backed up into a utility corridor where pipes and sewer lines were run, and where, more importantly, there were no guards. On the night of June 11, 1962, they put the fake heads in their beds to make it look like they were sleeping. Then they crawled through the holes in their walls and climbed up the pipes of the utility corridor into the ceiling. With their raincoat-raft and homemade paddles, they escaped to the roof and then dropped into the water. The three men were never seen again.

GREAT ESCAPES IN HISTORY

Alcatraz might have been nearly impossible to escape from, but it’s far from the only prison featuring some famous escapes! Here are some of the best escapes from prisons throughout history:

LOCHLEVEN CASTLE ESCAPE

In 1567, Mary, Queen of Scots was imprisoned in Lochleven Castle during a rebellion in Scotland. With no other queens willing to help her escape, she attempted on her own. First, she disguised herself as a woman in charge of laundry and tried to escape by boat. But when she hired men to row her away, they figured out who she was. She hurried back to the castle before the guards figured out what she’d done. A few months later, she tried again. This time, she had the help of an orphan she had befriended at the castle, and was able to take a boat to the mainland and ride away on a horse from the stables.

TOWER OF LONDON ESCAPE

Only a few inmates were able to escape the Tower of London over its 850 years as a prison. One spent ages wearing away at the stones around his cell door until he was able to get out. The next escapee, the Earl of Nithsdale, waited for his wife and her ladies-in-waiting (maids) to come visit, and he dressed just like them and walked right out! The original lady-in-waiting had brought a spare pair of clothing and left on her own a few hours later. The final escape was the least dramatic of all. He put a coat on so no one could see his prison outfit, then strolled out right in front of the guards. They assumed he was a visitor and didn’t question him. He went out for a few hours and then walked right back into the tower to reimprison himself!

THE LEADS

In 1755, Giacomo Casanova was sentenced to five years in The Leads, a prison in Venice, Italy. Trying to escape, he found an iron rod in the prison yard and spent months trying to dig a tunnel. But when he was forced to move to another cell where he would be carefully watched, he held onto his rod and secretly passed it to the prisoner in the cell next door. His neighbor dug one tunnel in the wall between their cells and another to the outside. They were able to crawl out together, use the tool to force open doors, and escape, before the police could find them.

SLAVERY

Before the US Civil War, the northern half of the country had banned slavery, but it was legal in the southern half and many slaves tried to escape. Henry Brown was born as a slave in 1816 in North Carolina. When his family was sold to a new owner in another state, he decided to try to escape to freedom. A carpenter built him a three-foot-tall, two-foot-wide box and wrote “right side up with care” on it. Two friends mailed the box, with Henry squeezed inside of it, to the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society in the free north. It took over 27 hours for him to make it to freedom!

US PRISON

When Frank Abagnale was transferred into prison in 1971, the government forgot to transfer his prison papers. During that time, many prisons were being inspected, and the guards were sure that this new inmate — without papers — must be an inspector. When Abagnale realized what the guards believed, he played along. The guards gave him special treatment so they’d get a good report! Abagnale had a friend on the outside make him a fake business card that claimed that he was an FBI prison inspector. He showed it to the guards, who were happy to tell him that they’d suspected it all along, and they let him walk right out of prison. He escaped for only two months before he was found and returned to prison.

EAST BERLIN

After World War II, a wall was built that split Berlin, Germany, in half. The eastern side was ruled by Communist leaders who wouldn’t let people escape to the free western side. Two East German families worked together to create a homemade hot air balloon. For months, the two fathers worked in their basements, building a gas burner that would be powerful enough to power the balloon. The two mothers sewed a massive balloon out of any kind of fabric they could find: tent nylon, umbrella fabric, even bedsheets! One night in September 1979, the two families launched their balloon. They had just enough fuel to make it over the wall and to land!

WE HOLD THE ROCK

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fter Alcatraz was shut down in 1963, it was left abandoned. In 1964, a Native American group claimed the island, saying that according to the government, Native Americans were allowed to claim any “unoccupied government land.” They held Alcatraz for only four hours. But five years later, a much larger group of Native Americans came to the island to try the same thing. They were young people from different tribes, and they did this to protest the government’s treatment of Native Americans. They wanted The Rock returned to Native Americans and for it to become a school and museum.

For 19 months, they lived on Alcatraz. More Native Americans came to the island until more than 600 people were living there. They set up a government, a hospital clinic, and a school for children. Many people supported them and sent them food, clothing, money, and a boat.

But by 1970, life on the island began to change. Many of the early organizers had to leave Alcatraz to go back to college. The people who replaced them didn’t care about the cause. The leader of the movement left the island after a tragedy, and the government cut all power to the island. A fire destroyed much of the island weeks after that, and only a few people remained by the end of the year. In 1971, the government took back the island. By then, there were only six men, five women, and four children living on Alcatraz.

However, the Native American mission had been somewhat successful. The government later created laws supporting the Native Americans’ rights to land. Today, you can still see some of the Native American graffiti on the walls of the old prison.

(Originally featured in Treeo, Issue 993)