The McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC) was a prison in the northwest United States, operated by the Washington State Department of Corrections. It was on McNeil Island in Puget Sound in unincorporated Pierce County, near Steilacoom, Washington."Mailing Requirements ". Washington State Department of Corrections. Retrieved on April 1, 2011. "McNeil Island Corrections Center P.O. Box 88100 Steilacoom, WA 98388-0900"
History Opened in 1875, it had previously served as a territorial correctional facility and then a Americans sentenced to terms of imprisonment by the United States courts that operated in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served their terms at McNeil Island.Peters, E.W. (2011). Shanghai Policeman. Earnshaw Books: Hong Kong. p. 118. . In the 1910s, inmates included Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz", who fatally stabbed a prison guard in March 1916.
During World War II, eighty-five Japanese Americans who had resisted the draft to protest their wartime confinement, including civil rights activist Gordon Hirabayashi, were sentenced to prison terms at McNeil; all were pardoned by President Harry S. Truman in 1947. and novelist James Fogle was sent to McNeil at the age of 17
In 1981, the State of Washington began to lease the facility from the federal government, and later that year the state department of corrections began moving prisoners into the facility, renamed "McNeil Island Corrections Center." In 1984, the island was deeded to the state government.
In November 2010, the department announced its plans to close the penitentiary by 2011, saving $14 million in the process.Sullivan, Jennifer; Clarridge, Christine "McNeil Island prison to close next year". The Seattle Times (November 20, 2010). Retrieved November 20, 2010.
Notable inmates
Mickey Cohen, 1930s Los Angeles mobster Anselmo L. Figueroa, Mexican anarchist Roy Gardner, bank robber, escaped from McNeil, 1921 Vincent Hallinan, 1952 presidential candidate Gordon Hirabayashi, resister against Japanese American internment during World War II Alvin Karpis, Depression-era gangster Tomoya Kawakita, war criminal and collaborator with Imperial Japan Charles Manson, of the Manson Family John David Norman, pedophile, sex offender and sex trafficker Roy Olmstead, bootlegger Alton Wayne Roberts,‘Ex-Sheriff Rainey: He’s Haunted by the Past’; The Boston Globe, September 22, 1974, p. 280 convicted by United States v. Price of the murders of Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner Robert Franklin Stroud, "The Birdman of Alcatraz", convicted murderer and cause célèbre
See also
List of law enforcement agencies in Washington (state) List of United States state correction agencies List of U.S. state prisons
References
Further reading
External links * "". Washington State Department of Corrections. Oppman, Patrick. "Last island prison in U.S. closes". CNN. April 1, 2011.