Alcatraz Research Paper

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On June 11, 1962, three men were reported missing from the Alcatraz Federal Prison. To this day, nobody knows what happened to them. Using the evidence provided, it is impossible to determine whether the three inmates successfully escaped from Alcatraz.
So what is Alcatraz? Located a mile and a half away from land on an island made from solid rock, Alcatraz is surrounded by the cold, unforgiving waters of the San Francisco bay. Dealing with the criminal population is a problem in every society. America’s answer to that problem was Alcatraz. It was built to be a maximum security prison, and was designed to hold the “worst of the worst” criminals, such as Al Capone, machine-gun Kelly, and Alvin Karpis. A sentence at Alcatraz was meant to be viewed as the harshest punishment a prisoner could receive, other than execution. The cells that the criminals were imprisoned in were five feet wide and nine feet long. You could stretch out your arms and touch the sides of your …show more content…

They also had learned to make life vests and rafts out of raincoats from a Popular Mechanics magazine. The raincoats were donated or stolen from other inmates. Finally, on the night of June 11, 1962 they placed their dummy heads on their pillows and crawled through the cell wall hole for the last time.
They climbed up the plumbing pipes toward the roof of the cell house where they saw the moon for the first time in months. Once they were on the roof, they shimmied down a pipe to the ground.
The three inmates then ran to the shore and inflated their raft and life vests with a musical instrument called a concertina which is like an accordion, which they used as bellows. Next, they launched their raft into the bay. Their plan was to paddle to Angel Island where they would steal a car, get some clothes and guns and get far away from Alcatraz

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