I Escaped From Alcatraz!

Hey Hannah and Everyone!
I am having so much fun on my San Francisco adventure and today, I got to visit Alcatraz! We had to get there by boat because it is a prison on an island. Alcatraz was known for being the toughest prison in the United States and it housed the most dangerous criminals. It was also known for being "escape proof" and I got to see the jail cells up close. Alcatraz is no longer an active prison and is now the most popular tourist attraction in California. Alcatraz is awesome!

This shows the prison on the island. The picture above shows the Golden Gate bridge in the distance.

Because Alcatraz is open to visitors and tours, we were able to take a boat to the prison on the island.

These girls greeted me on the boat. They were wearing prison uniforms!:

There are three stories of jail cells inside the prison walls:

Here I am with two of the most famous Alcatraz inmates:
"Birdman" had a movie made about him and Al Capone was a famous gangster inmate.
This is what a typical jail cell looks like:

Here I am behind bars!


I had fun pretending to be a prisoner and Mrs. Juli even pretended to visit me:
This is where the prisoners would meet with their family members:

Each prisoner could only have one visitor per month.

Many prisoners said that the worst part of being on Alcatraz was that they were so close to San Francisco and could sometimes hear the sounds of the city. Freedom was within sight but impossible to obtain because the San Francisco Bay water is freezing and can be shark infested.
The best escape attempt occurred when these three men made up dummy heads after they scraped away at their cell walls with crude materials and steel spoons from the lunchroom:

This is what the prison guards saw when they went to wake the prisoners up one morning. The guards got suspicious when three men never got out of bed or moved and they were shocked to find the fake heads and no inmates.
The inmates made these dummy heads out of soap, toilet paper and other craft materials and they got the real human hair from the barber shop floor.

You can see where they scraped the walls with their steel spoons. The guards think that it must have taken the men at least one year to scrape and scrape until they finally made a hole big enough to squeeze through.
They would cover their hole every night after digging away and then, finally, they were able to escape through this area behind the cell walls:
They crawled out of this area and made it out into the San Francisco Bay. It is suspected that they drowned in the freezing cold water but their bodies were never found.

This lady used to live on Alcatraz as a little girl; her father was the warden of the prison and she had to ride a boat into the city for school every day:
Mrs. Jane and Mrs. Elaine bought her book.
Here is a picture of her when she was a little girl and lived on Alcatraz island; she is the one wearing the hat:
She told me that they had so much fun growing up on the island and she was friends with other prison guard's children. She told me a secret about how to escape and Mrs. Juli let me try it and it worked!
This was the old prison yard and I found a pipe and slid all the way down like a really big slide and ended up coming out at the bottom and near the boat landing! Mrs. Juli took pictures of me escaping! Can you see me in the little drainage pipe?
Here I am up close! It was so much fun escaping from Alcatraz!

I sure am glad that blackboard fell on me and made me flat so that I can do all of these fun things!
I am experiencing so much with Mrs. Jane and Mrs. Elaine! I hope you are having a good week at school.

Love,

Flat Stanley