McNeil Island
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McNeil Island is an island in Puget Sound, located just west of Steilacoom, Washington at 3. It was named in 1841 by the Wilkes Expedition after Captain William Henry McNeill of the Hudson's Bay Company, founder of Victoria, British Columbia. The Robert A. Inskip expedition of 1846 named the island Duntze, after Captain John A. Duntze of the Royal Navy, but it is the earlier name that stuck.
The United States government bought land on McNeil Island in 1870 and opened a prison for Washington Territory there in 1875. It became a federal penitentiary when Washington became a state in 1889. Its most famous inmate was probably Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz," who was held there from 1909 to 1912. By 1937 the federal government, which had been accumulating parcels adjacent to the penitentiary, had purchased all the land on the island and compelled its last residents to leave. Charles Manson was an inmate from 1961 to 1966 for trying to cash a government check.
Washington state took over the penitentiary from the federal government in 1981. It is now called McNeil Island Corrections Center. According to the state, it is the only facility in the U.S. to have been a territorial, federal, and state prison, and is the only prison left in North America that is only accessible by boat or air. It is presently the site of the state's primary Special Commitment Center, where sexually violent predators are committed for treatment after completing their standard prison sentences.
The island has a land area of 17.177 km² (6.6319 sq mi), and had a population of 1,516 residents as of the 2000 census. The majority of the residents are incarcerated in MICC prison while several hundred are civilly committed to SCC. There are about 40 families and about 100 people that live on the island. The non-incarcerated families have at least one family member employed at MICC. There is no commerce or stores on the island and access to the island is strictly controlled by the Department of Corrections making it the most exclusive island in the entire Puget Sound.
[edit] References
- McNeil Island: Census Tract 727, Pierce County, Washington United States Census Bureau
