Trail of the Unexpected: Alcatraz

Alcatraz was home to more than prisoners, as one former resident remembers

"We lived in a low-crime neighbourhood, there was as much fish as we could eat, and we had the best views in northern California. They called it the poor man's Hawaii." Not, perhaps, the way every inmate would remember life in Alcatraz, but Jolene Babyak had a different perspective from most: although she lived on the island, she was not an inmate. She returns to the island often to meet the visitors who arrive by the boatload from the mainland, and she almost feels that she still lives there.

Despite the fact that she and the prison population shared a patch of land that covers only 12 acres, Jolene rarely saw a prisoner. She lived on Alcatraz for two periods during her childhood, when her father was deputy governor of the most famous prison in America. They were one of 65 families who lived on the island, apparently untroubled by their less-than-perfect neighbours.

"I suppose it's no different from living in a city next to a police station," says Jolene. A boat collected the island's 75 children every morning and took them the mile and a half across San Francisco Bay to school. Jolene was the most popular girl in her class: everyone wanted to be invited back to Alcatraz for tea.

The island was originally discovered by the early Spanish explorers, who were amazed by the variety of its birdlife; they named it Isla de los Alcatraces, the island of the gannets. Birds still circle around the island: cormorants, oyster catchers and guillemots. They nest in safety, protected by an almost complete absence of animals.

Uninhabited for centuries, Alcatraz became the site of one of three forts built to defend San Francisco in the mid-19th century, and prisoners began to be housed there, among them the conscientious objectors of the First World War. The convicts who were sent there during the period that it was a federal prison were troublemakers, sentenced to Alcatraz for disrupting other prisoners or for trying to escape.

One of the first men to be incarcerated in the federal penitentiary was the island's most famous inmate, Al Capone. He was sent to Alcatraz in 1934 and remained there for five years. Jolene Babyak is too young to remember him.

The prison was closed by Robert Kennedy, then Attorney-General, in 1963. Following a 19-month occupation by Native American activists, many of the buildings on the island were bulldozed, an activity that stopped only when the island became part of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.

Ten years after its closure, Alcatraz reopened to tourists, and it is now one of the most popular attractions in the US. Many of the buildings are derelict, including the warden's house, with its uninterrupted views of the San Francisco skyline, and the morgue, where prisoners' bodies were held until they could be returned to their families, or buried on nearby Angel Island.

Most complete is the cell block, where the inmates spent most of their time. There is a kitchen and a canteen where they ate three meals a day – reckoned to be the best prison food in the country. The rows of tiny cells, each equipped with nothing more than a bed, a washbasin and a lavatory, are a chilling sight. Three of them have been left as they would have been after the last escape took place in 1962: a hole knocked through the wall into an escape passage; a dummy head on the pillow intended to fool any passing warder. Jackets hang on hooks on the wall, and there are magazines and books lying on the beds. It was this final attempt to escape from Alcatraz, portrayed in a 1979 film starring Clint Eastwood, for which the island is most famous. Getting away was almost impossible, and no one can say for certain whether any of the 14 attempts to do so actually succeeded. But the last escapees, Frank Morris and the Anglin brothers, John and Clarence, have never been found, either dead or alive. They are still classified as fugitives, and could be the only men ever to have succeeded in escaping from Alcatraz. But unlike Jolene Babyak, it is doubtful whether they would ever want to return.

The US National Park Service website (www.nps.gov/alcatraz) gives the history of the island and details of the tours available from San Francisco.