Did someone really escape from Alcatraz?

Alcatraz was one of the United States' most notorious prisons -- isolated on an island and surrounded by sharks. Check out this HowStuffWorks podcast to learn more about the fact and fiction surrounding escape attempts at Alcatraz.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Candice Gibson joined today as always Buy Stuff
writer Joshua m Clark. I am joining you, Candice, whether

(00:21):
you like it or not. Yes, we are one team
Fourth Factory Fiction. Yeah, or Team Jaundice as you like
to call it. I do. That is my name for us,
Team Jaundice, because we are not only UM partners and podcasting,
we're partners and writing and editing. That is true. That
is true. So, Candice, I know you don't know this,

(00:41):
but there's this really cool webcam. Uh it's called Alcatraz
Live or something like that, I think. And you go
on and I think it's on this default setting. It's
just showing San Francisco, but you can turn the camera
whichever way you want and one of the selections is
Alcatraz and basically you can just sit there and watch

(01:02):
Alcatraz in real time. There's not a happening. That's that's
really the one the one thing. I mean, every once
in a while you might see like a tour boat
go by or something like that. Not the hotbed of
activity today that it once was, but it once was
a pretty cool place. Right. Have you ever seen Escape
from Alcatraz? No? But I have seen so I married

(01:25):
an axe murderer. And there's a scene in which Mike
Meyers and Anthony Lapallia go to Alcatraz on the tour
Have you ever been? I've never been. I've never been.
Now I hear good things though, I hear it's kind
of cool. You're good things about a former federal peditentiary
about a tour of the yes, right, yeah, No, not
too many good things about Alcatraz, um, although there have

(01:47):
been some cool movies made. Murder in the first Escape
from Alcatraz, Like I said, Birdman of Alcatraz, that is
a great movie, very heartening. And I was actually surprised
to see an actual picture of Robert Strap the Birdman
of Alcatraz, because I thought he looked exactly like Burt
Lancaster in the movie. Apparently not, but clearly the best,

(02:07):
the best Alcatraz movie ever was Escaped from Alcatraz, starring
Mr Clint east Twin you haven't seen it, so he
plays this guy. And here's my question. This is this
is what the question is based on. So listen carefully Okay,
he plays this guy named Frank Morris who is supposedly
an inmate, uh and Alcatraz and like the early sixties
or something like that, and along with two brothers, Clarence

(02:30):
and John Anglin, he Um basically digs his way out
of Alcatraz with a spoon and makes off into this
horribly chilly, shark infested bay um on a life raft
made of raincoats. So my question is this just like Hollywood?

(02:51):
WHOI or is that fact? Is that fiction? Answer? It's
actually fact. So this really did happen, like escape from Alcatraz?
Really happy? Yeah, it really happened. Okay, how how does
one make a rink or how a life raft out
of raincoat? Now that I can't tell you. I'm now
Martha's steward of of great prison escape accouterments, But I'm

(03:12):
sure you could probably find a how to somewhere on
the lab. It's a good thing. Um Alcatraz, Like you said,
I just want to fill everybody in this in case
you haven't been watching the webcam. Alcatraz is this incredibly
isolated place. It's essentially a mountaintop. It's all rock. There
are barely any plans that will grow there. It's incredibly isolated,

(03:32):
and like you said, the water around it is so
so cold. I think on a good day it might
be sixty degrees fahrenheit. And there are great whites that
are constantly patrolling the water. So anyone perfect. Oh, it
is definitely And it's been reinforced, or it had been
reinforced a couple of times. It was first built. I
know this, I know this. You're ready. So the Alcatraz,

(03:55):
the island was actually first officially surveyed in eighteen forty
seven and they realized, hey, you could really protect San
Francisco from this location, right, So it became an outpost
during the Civil War and uh that it was basically
meant to stave off any Confederate invasion, which never came.
And actually the guns on Alcatraz were fired a few times,

(04:18):
but it was always a case of mistaken identity. But
the thing is you had the citadel, this outpost, um
and Alcatraz evolved into a prison almost um. Naturally, people
started putting, you know, war deserters and things in the
basement of the citadel, and over time more and more
people were being kept there, and then finally the the

(04:40):
the army I think was the one who who ran
it said wait, we're not really you know, in the
business of running prisons. Jaeger Hoover, who was running the
FBI at the time, said, well, I am, and I'm
actually looking for a perfect place to become like this
horrible hole that the symbol of what happens to you
if you're a gangster crook in America, because I'm going

(05:01):
to catch you. And thus Alcatraz is porn. Nineteen thirty four. Uh,
it opened its doors for the first time, accepting its
first prisoners and began it's um. It's declined into its
image ofty. Yes, and you know it's funny because even
though it it declined into notoriety, it was incredibly high

(05:24):
tech as far as US prisons went. It was especially
for Yeah, I was top of the line. And when
it was a military prison, I had iron bars. But
nineteen thirty four they replaced it all with steel and
everything was reinforced with concrete, and it was serious business.
And it actually cost more to replace all the bars
with steel than it did to build a prison from scratch. Yeah.

(05:45):
For in the nineteen twelve version, right, yeah, because I
actually did make it a military prison. I forgot to
mention this in nineteen twelve, but then it went It
went down after a few years to how did it
go down? They just left it alone. Oh, even like
it fell to ruin. It was decommissioned as another way
to put it, and it was revived. It had its

(06:06):
renaissance under under Hoover. There you go. And there were
a lot of famous prisoners who trapes in an ad
and the cells were pretty lonely places to be, but
they weren't too bad. And that was a strange thing
about Acatraz is that even though we may have this
Hollywood perception of it as a very scary place, it
wasn't too different from other prisons. It was fairly clean,

(06:27):
well capped, and the prisoners, you know, they had their
individual cells with a bed and a toilet, and they
were riding five ft wide by nine ft deep. I
was saying, they're trying to imagine that today. That is
almost precisely the dimensions of a couple of our cupicles
put together. Yeah, it really doesn't sound that terrible. They
even had shelves for their personal effects. Yeah, yeah, which

(06:48):
is strange because you wouldn't think of, you know, prisoners
in Alcatraz having personal effects. I was wondering that too,
but I guess people sent them things. Yeah, you know
thought the first time. The first warden actually, as I understand,
didn't allow speaking like the the prisoners couldn't speak, including
during meals, and like that kind of rigid strictness, the

(07:11):
argument goes um, actually made Alcatraz a safer place for
prisoners than most other prisoners. And they're most other prisons
in the country. You you weren't very likely to get shipped.
You know, you can't even talk, so how can you
offend somebody? And if you can't offend somebody, you're not
gonna end up with a sharpened toothbrush in your stomach.
And you're right about that. James Johnston was the name

(07:33):
of the first warden, and he ran a really really
tight ship. And eventually the prisoners all figured out, well,
anyone who talks gets sent to confinement, but if we
all talk, they can't send us anywhere because there's too
many of us. So they all started talking at once,
really really loud, that no one could do a darned thing,
and thus ended the day long silence. Essentially, just be awful.

(07:55):
I think you and I would both go out of
our mind and saying if we couldn't talk, especially you.
I'm sorry I didn't say that. But it was funny
about these prisoners too, is that they weren't all gangsters.
There were some who, you know, had committed smaller crimes,
you know, sort of a Jean Valjean stealing a lift
of bread thing, and they were all lumped in there together,
so somewhere a little bit more gentlemanly and the um.

(08:15):
When the silence was lifted, I think that the prisoners
became a little bit more cooperative and easier to manage,
you know, like any other prison. They had their library time,
their exercise time there, you know, lending a helping hand time,
and Alcatraz itself it was almost like its own little
community because it was an isolated island. The wardens and

(08:37):
their families lived there. Yeah, yeah, I heard this. Just
really weird. You would you live on Alcatraz with your
kids because there were kids on the island because they
had a policy that children weren't allowed to have toy guns,
so to protect those toy guns ending up in the
hands of a prisoner who could use it to bluff
his way out of the prison rightly, and the kids

(09:01):
it was a very strange lifestyle for them because they
had to get boted over to the mainland for school.
And I was like, you know, I mean, we have
jokes today about you know, kids getting picked up and
ratty looking cars and staff outside of their elementary schools.
What if you were the kid who came over from
the Alcatraz boat. I just I feel really sorry for them. Yes,
so apparently life on Alcatraz sucked for everybody. It did.

(09:22):
But to answer your question, which I realized, yeah, I
was out taking a very round about way circuitus indeed. Um.
But to answer your question, which you asked me about
five minutes ago, I know, did brothers really escaped using
nothing but spoons, cardboard and rain coats? Fact, yes, this
is in the Annals of Murky and Mysterious Alcatraz History. Uh.

(09:47):
Clarence and John England and their friend Frank Morris essentially
had a very long and grueling plan during which they
used parents to ship away it rotted concrete around these
vents in their cells, and they used painted cardboard to
mimic the appearance of the vents as they were, so
that it would look as though no damage had been

(10:08):
done to the infrastructure of their cells. And then once
the holes got big enough, Um, this is all very
Shawshank redemption. You know, they had they hit it with
painted cardboard instead of a big poster Hayworth, but the
principle was the same. At that point they could crawl
into the hole and then there was a tunnel through
which they they worked their way in and they used
this as sort of their workshop for constructing this raft

(10:31):
and life vests out of the raincoat material. Don't ask
me how it stayed a float, especially if they were
shark infested waters. But supposedly they made it out and
no one ever recovered anybody's They did find a plastic
bag floating around with some of their effects on it.
But supposedly they made off and there was a ship
waiting for them and they escaped. So they were never found,

(10:54):
not one of them, never found, no complete break from Alcatraz.
So this is one of those cases where Hollywood it
is actually pretty accurate. Huh. There you have it, And
I'm really really proud of that Shallshan predemption analogy, because
as you guys know, I never see any movies but
that one. That one I did. Yeah, good going. Thanks.

(11:14):
So I actually have one more fun fact about acatre.
You may be wondering, how did the England Brothers and
their friend Frank Morrish make off without the guards noticing. Answer.
They made paper mache heads and put them in their
beds and cover them up with sheets, so it looked
like they were actually people sleeping, and they weren't discovered
until they've made it off. That's the same thing that
happened in the movie. Ar't ientertaining life with lots of

(11:37):
versa militude? Yes, well, everyone's looking not at You can
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