JodockWorldTravel

You can’t go to San Francisco and not visit Alcatraz.  Ken had been there before, but Pam had not and it wasn’t quite what she expected.  Alcatraz wasn’t so much a place for the worst of the worst criminals – it was more like detention hall for bad prisoners.  Prisoners who misbehaved or refused to follow the rules elsewhere were sent to Alcatraz.  A prisoner might serve four years, fifteen years or a life sentence – being at Alcatraz did not necessarily mean you were serving a life sentence.  There were 14 escape attempts during Alcatraz’s 30-year history, only one potentially successful.  The old timers reading this will remember the movie based on this effort, “Escape From Alcatraz.”  To this day, no one knows what happened to the three men who made that attempt.

In the pictures below you see Alcatraz from a distance, as we are approaching from the mainland, photos of the prisoners whose voices are included in the self-guided audio tour, the public showers prisoners used (there are 40 shower heads for an average prison population of 287 men – prisoners showered twice a week), a row of cell blocks, and some individual cells.  The first cell Pam is standing in front of and the next are of the “standard” cells.  In the last picture she is in one of the solitary confinement cells.  If she doesn’t look happy, it’s because this is not a happy place.