It held Charles Manson, the Birdman of Alcatraz and 136 years of history just miles from Tacoma
You can’t visit the remains of the prison on McNeil Island, but you can take a walk through its 136-year history.
An exhibit chronicling the history of the prison opens Saturday (Jan. 26) and runs through May 26 at the Washington State History Museum in Tacoma.
“Unlocking McNeil’s Past: The Prison, The Place, The People” explores the place that served variously as territorial prison, state correction center and federal penitentiary.
In 2011, the state closed the prison that predated its own statehood. Now, it’s a ghost town filled with history on a 4,200-acre forbidden island.
PRISON ISLAND
Today, blackberry vines creep into the buildings that held generations of prisoners. Three miles of water separate the prison from Chambers Bay Golf Course on the mainland.
It’s easy to draw comparisons between McNeil and the country’s most famous island prison — Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay.
Like Alcatraz, McNeil held its share of infamous prisoners. Charles Manson was a prisoner there before his Helter Skelter days. Robert Stroud stabbed a fellow inmate at McNeil. He’d later become known as The Birdman of Alcatraz.
Despite’s McNeil’s much longer history, it’s virtually unknown outside the state, even in it. The show aims to change that.
“There was a lot of controversy over where to put the prison,” lead curator Gwen Whiting said.
That controversy did not center on opposition to the prison but the desire for one. Prisons meant jobs and a boost to the local economy.
Like Alcatraz, the idea of criminals confined to an island added another layer of security, even if it was mostly psychological.
“At that time, they felt there was less of a possibility of escape,” Whiting said of the island location.
In fact, many prisoners would escape from McNeil over the decades. The Key Peninsula is less than 2,000 feet away from the island at low tide.
“People escaped all the time,” said KNKX reporter Paula Wissel. The Tacoma public radio stationed partnered with the museum to create the exhibit and a related podcast.
The island’s earliest users were Puyallup, Squaxin Island, Steilacoom and Nisqually tribal members who were there long before whites settled it in the 1800s, Whiting said.
When the prison was completed in 1875, a single building held 48 cells, three tiers high.
From the beginning, running a prison on the island proved challenging.
“It was hard to get to,” Whiting said. “It took a lot of resources to bring things to an island.”
A prisoner-operated dairy, farms and cattle ranching helped.
“The prisoners sustained themselves,” she said. “When you live on an island, you want to bring in as little as possible.”
When the territory became a state in 1889, Washington didn’t want the prison.
Instead, it became a federal penitentiary.
In addition to federal prisoners, McNeil held conscientious objectors from World War I through the Vietnam War.
During World War II, the prison held citizens of Japanese ancestry who had been incarcerated in American concentration camps and refused to fight in the war.
The prison was used multiple times as an immigrant detention center, the most recent during the Mariel boat lift from Cuba in 1980.
In the 1970s, the prison began to show its age, and the problems of being on an island, which had plagued it from its earliest days, still existed. It’s not easy getting people and supplies on and off via boat or helicopter.
“At the same time, the state was experiencing overcrowding in its prisons,” Whiting said.
In 1981, the feds left, and McNeil became a medium security state prison.
The state prison was considered progressive for its time, Whiting said. Trustees worked in the local community, and other prisoners learned trades in a minimum-security Work Ethic Camp in the 1990s.
In 2011, the prison was closed for good during a state budget crisis. Officials said the closure would save millions per year.
Today, the island is the site of the Special Commitment Center for violent sexual predators.
As far as the public goes, the island remains off limits. Farms and homes are slowly decaying as the island becomes a nature preserve.
LIFE IN THE BIG HOUSE
The history museum show isn’t artifact-heavy, Whiting said. But it does have one very heavy artifact.
The prison’s 1924 administration building’s gate, 12-feet high and 2,000 pounds, is on display. The state Department of Corrections had been storing it at Stafford Creek Corrections Center near Aberdeen.
The gate was designed by George Gove, an architect who also designed Tacoma’s Lincoln High School and Paradise Inn at Mount Rainier National Park.
Some of the history is small and ephemeral. A prison guard’s notes recorded a day’s worth of meals in 1907.
Breakfast consisted of oatmeal mush and milk, syrup, baked beans, bread and coffee. Lunch, which seemed to be the heaviest meal of the day, was soup, boiled beef and cabbage, steamed potatoes, tomato pickles, bread and water. Dinner was a light beef stock and gravy with baked potatoes, bread and tea.
A video monitor shows mugshots of some of McNeil’s inmates. It’s a mesmerizing gallery of men, young and old, and multiple ethnicities.
Along with the Birdman and Manson — who was incarcerated there from 1960-1966 for forgery — the prison had other notable prisoners.
Alvin Karpis arrived at McNeil in 1962, after 26 years in other prisons, including Alcatraz, where he’d met the Birdman. Karpis’ nickname was “Creepy.”
Karpis ran with the Barker gang in the days when gangsters were celebrities. FBI director J. Edgar Hoover arrested him in 1936. At the time, Karpis was listed as Public Enemy No. 1.
Karpis taught Manson how to play guitar. Manson later directed a series of cult-style murders in 1969, including the slaying of actress Sharon Tate.
Samuel Bowers, imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, stepped on to the island in 1970, after being convicted in the 1966 bombing death of civil rights activist Vernon Dahmer in Mississippi.
Perhaps some of those men used the bunks the museum has on display. There’s also art and a handmade violin crafted by the prisoners.
One of the items in the show was collected by Whiting on a research trip to the prison.
It’s a small book intended to be given to prisoners’ children. It’s titled, “Where My Dad Lives,” and written “by long distance dads.” The book from the 2000s was produced by a ministry group.
“It’s really heartbreaking,” Whiting said. “What do you say to a child? It talks about what your dad eats, where he lives, what he does. These are things you can do with your dad. This is how you cannot make the same choices he did.”
Whiting found it discarded under the piles of furniture and other objects strewn around the prison buildings.
The exhibit ends with a photo gallery. Images show what the prison looks like today. A net still hangs on a basketball hoop. A mural, painted by a prisoner, adorns a dining room.
The exhibit isn’t meant to be interactive. Yes, there’s an obligatory ball and chain and an iron cell door. But there is no cell. In the Instagram era, curators didn’t want the exhibit to become material for online selfies.
“There’s a lot of gravity to the experience of losing your liberty,” Whiting said. “What if your family was impacted by it?”
PODCAST
Wissel and fellow KNKX reporter Simone Alicea have produced a six–part podcast, “Forgotten Prison,” on the history of the prison.
The episodes cover the people who grew up on the island, prison managers, former prisoners, prison buildings, the Special Commitment Center and other topics.
The first podcast is available now at forgottenprison.org.
In their interviews with the people who worked there and their families, Wissel and Alicea learned that many of them considered life on the island to be idyllic. Residences didn’t get their own phone lines until 1957.
“They had this image of it being this wonderful place,” Wissel said.
As long as you were on the outside of the prison walls.
In the early 1950s, the U.S. Army performed medical testing on 200 inmates, infecting them with hepatitis. The experiment was halted after prisoners died.
Wissel and Alicea worked hard to find ex-prisoners for their podcast.
“They wanted to put it in the past,” Wissel said of former prisoners. “It’s not something people wanted to talk about it.”
It was easier, she said, to find people still incarcerated who had also done time on McNeil.
Wissel interviewed former McNeil prisoner Mark Bolf while he was incarcerated at the Monroe Correctional Complex.
“He arrived in the early to mid-80s and they were still using those old cell houses,” Wissel said. “He talked about that being a fairly scary experience. He did his time on the ‘installment plan.’ He was in and out for car theft.”
Bolf recalled Fourth of July celebrations when prisoners could watch fireworks launched from a barge.
Although Alcatraz’s existence as a prison (1934-1963) was brief, it far outshines McNeil’s in popular culture.
Wissel doesn’t see McNeil ever getting the same treatment as Alcatraz.
Today, Alcatraz is a national park. McNeil, meanwhile, is decaying into history.
‘Unlocking McNeil’s Past’
When: Jan. 26 to May 26
Where: Washington State History Museum, 1911 Pacific Ave., Tacoma
Information: washingtonHistory.org/McNeil
Podcast: ForgottenPrison.org
This story was originally published January 24, 2019 at 1:58 PM.
