Alcatraz

This weekend we went to Alcatraz, aka Muggle Azkaban. We'd been hearing it was a cool place to visit since we spent the summer here 2013, but it took us a few years to get our act together enough to finally do it.

I had thought Alcatraz was just a big rocky island with a prison on it, but I learned from the scale model on the ferry landing that it actually has a bunch of buildings on it:

In addition to the prison, there were also apartments and other housing for the prison staff and their families (including a big mansion for the warden),  a post office, an officers' club, a power plant, a few buildings where prisoners did various sorts of industrial labor, and a lighthouse. Apparently at any given time there were about 75 children living on Alcatraz, and they would take the ferry to school in San Francisco each day.

The ferry ride to the island is a nice treat in and of itself, since you have beautiful views of the Bay the whole way.

As you pull up to the island, the first thing you see is the famous "Indians Welcome" sign from the 1969-71 occupation:

Walking up the hill to the prison, you see another remnant from that time on the island's water tower:

I was most curious to learn about the Indian occupation, but unsurprisingly the tour doesn't address it at all - it just focuses on the active years of the prison (although apparently there is a short film about the occupation that plays in the small theater by the gift shop, we just didn't manage to catch it).

The walk to the prison revealed another thing I didn't know about the island - over the years its various occupants brought in lots of soil, and now it actually has surprisingly nice gardens throughout.

I found the prison itself to be not as bad as I expected - I think because my mental baseline for historical prisons is Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly, which is basically a giant stone dungeon of horror. The cells in Alcatraz seemed spacious and well-lit by comparison.

Of course, I don't think there's any amount of spaciousness and lighting that makes spending decades confined to a cell not horrifying.

The thing that seemed most outdated about the prison was its close proximity to San Francisco, since now prisons are increasingly being moved out of cities and into rural areas as a growth industry, which amplifies the racial inequity of the criminal justice system. It's hard to imagine what contemporary American cities would look like if they had to contain all the prisons necessary to maintain the modern carceral state, or if mass incarceration could have even become so extreme if its consequence weren't tucked away out of easy view.