If you were a prisoner on Alcatraz Island, every aspect of your life would be controlled by a higher authority. If you like to have a midnight snack every now and then, that luxury would be taken away. If you like to sit around and watch TV for hours, you can forget about that too.
Alcatraz has a long history of transformation as to how it came to be known as the inescapable prison island. This reputation did not stop a handful of men to try and do the impossible and escape the island.
Alcatraz, also known as "The Rock", is a well-known yet mysterious place containing many forgotten memories and lost ghosts. Though no one really knows everything that went on within the concealed walls of the old prison, it still manages to trap the interests of millions of people who visit the national park each day on the small island in the San Francisco Bay. Not only has it trapped the interests of those millions of visitors, but it has also trapped mine as well.
Discovered in 1775 by a Spanish explorer named Juan Miguel de Ayala, La Isla de los Alcatraces was nothing more than a small island inhabited by a group of pelicans from which the island acquired its name (Alcatraces means pelicans in Spanish). In 1847, the United States Government began view Alcatraz as more than just an island, but also an excellent location for a military fort; by 1853, a State of the Art military fortress was protecting the Western half of the United States against any foreign invasion. With the eruption of the Civil War, Alcatraz began accepting its first military prisoners in 1861. However, it wasn't until the Spanish-American War in 1898 that the United States realized that the isolation of the island made it an excellent candidate for a prison. The prison population jumped from twenty-six to 450 during