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ALCATRAZ America’s first maximum-security prison is a terrifying structure located in the middle of the San Francisco Bay. It taunted the U.S.’s roughest criminals for nearly 30 years before its fall. Meant to punish unruly prisoners rather than rehabilitate them like federal prisons had before, Alcatraz encaged their undisciplined lives and forced them to live in remorse. With San Francisco’s shore one mile away from the island, it let the prisoners see what they were missing everyday of their lives. “The forbidding concrete facade made it a most impenetratable prison” ( Quillen 85). On the inside, strict rules limited free time and few privileges made life miserable for inmates. All of this made Alcatraz the toughest and most feared penitentiary in the country. The Alacatraz that is most famous for being the penitentiary that locked away the likes of dangerous gangsters like Capone, didn’t start out in the federal prison system. Its history started in 1775 when the Spanish Explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala found the island and christened it “Isle de los Alcatraces.” The island wasn’t put into use until 1848 when the news of a gold rush in California hit. The common public was afraid of an attack upo