Ninety years ago, the infamous prison at Alcatraz Island opened its doors to its first inmates who had previously stirred up trouble all over America.
Situated just offshore from San Francisco, it was initially designed as a naval defense fort. In 1861, it was repurposed to house military offenders and in 1934, the island was converted into a maximum security federal penitentiary.
While the prison ultimately closed in 1963, it saw a diverse group of prisoners in its early years, according to John Martini, historian and former park ranger at Alcatraz.
"At its peak, there were only 302 people held on the island. That was a high. Normally, there were only about 250, 260," Martini told KCBS Radio. "The staff was extremely large. There was about 75 to 95 correctional officers, engineers, lighthouse keepers, maintenance people. So it was a very high staff to prisoner ratio."
Of course, one of the most famous things about Alcatraz is the escape attempts made by prisoners desperate for their freedom.
"Five men disappeared in the water. The first two, they were pretty much being seen swept out to sea in the fog and they know they were in the water and they were struggling. Bodies were never found," said Martini. "And then there was in 1962, the famous escape that Clint Eastwood made famous -- the escape from Alcatraz, when three guys had about a nine-hour head start and they got to the water and they paddled away and made shipwrecks, never seen again."
Prisoner escapes weren't the reason the prison got shut down, however.
"First, it was very expensive to operate, about three times the cost of a similar size institution on the mainland. It's an island. Everything had to be brought out from water to fuel oil to food. And second, they were changing thoughts about incarceration," said Martini. "Alcatraz was the first maximum security, minimum privilege. There wasn't any rehabilitation, there were no classes offered. And by the early 1960s, the combination of a changing way of looking at how we incarcerated people and treated them and the incredible expense just led Bobby Kennedy, as Attorney General, to order the place shut down in March 1963."
The island remained largely quiet for years, until November 1969 when it was occupied by a large group of Native Americans, mostly students from UC Berkeley and San Francisco State, in the name of freedom.
"It was the start of a 19-month takeover by a group calling themselves Indians of All Tribes -- Native Americans reclaiming what they said was native land. And they had a treaty going back to 1868 that sort of inferred that excess government property could be occupied and taken by Native Americans. And the government contested that, but they didn't push it," Martini explained.
"The occupation, at its high point, there were several hundred people living on the island. There had been caretakers out there, but they were just overwhelmed by the sheer number of occupiers. And they were eventually moved off in June of 1971," he added. "No charges were ever pressed. Everyone was just released on the mainland."
Following the occupation, the government took the island back and it became a national park site that was open to the public in October of 1973. Today, Alcatraz Island welcomes over 1.5 million visitors a year.