McNeil Island Corrections Center
Prison in Washington state, United States
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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,[1] near Steilacoom, Washington.[2]
 McNeil Island in 1937 | |
  Location in Washington  Location in the United States | |
| Location | |
|---|---|
| Status | Closed |
| Security class | Medium |
| Capacity | 853 |
| Opened | 1875 |
| Closed | 2011 |
| Former name | McNeil Island Federal Penitentiary (1904–1981) |
| Managed by | Federal Bureau of Prisons (1904–1981) Washington State Department of Corrections (1981–2011) |
History
Opened in 1875, it had previously served as a territorial correctional facility and then a federal penitentiary.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] Career criminal and novelist James Fogle was sent to McNeil at the age of 17 in the 1950s.[6]
In 1981, the State of Washington began to lease the facility from the federal government,[7] 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.[8]
In November 2010, the department announced its plans to close the penitentiary by 2011, saving $14 million in the process.[9]
Notable inmates
- Mickey Cohen, 1930s Los Angeles mobster
- Anselmo L. Figueroa, Mexican anarchist
- Roy Gardner, bank robber, escaped from McNeil, 1921[10]
- Vincent Hallinan, 1952 presidential candidate[11]
- Gordon Hirabayashi, resister against Japanese American internment during World War II
- Alvin Karpis, Depression-era gangster[7]
- Tomoya Kawakita, war criminal and collaborator with Imperial Japan
- Charles Manson, of the Manson Family[10]
- John David Norman, pedophile, sex offender and sex trafficker[12]
- Roy Olmstead, bootlegger[10]
- Alton Wayne Roberts,[13] 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[7]
