McNeil Island Corrections Center

McNeil Island Penitentiary in 1937

The McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC) was a Washington State Department of Corrections prison on McNeil Island in unincorporated Pierce County, Washington, near Steilacoom.^[1]

Opened in 1875, it had previously served as a territorial correctional facility and then a Federal Bureau of Prisons facility. Americans sentenced to terms of imprisonment by the United States courts that operated in China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries served their terms at McNeil Island.^[2] In the 1910s inmates included Robert Stroud, the "Birdman of Alcatraz", who fatally stabbed a prison guard in March 1916. During World War II, eighty-five Japanese Americans who had resisted the draft to protest their wartime confinement, including civil rights activist Gordon Hirabayashi, were sentenced to prison terms at McNeil; all were pardoned by President Harry S. Truman in 1947.^[3] Career criminal and novelist James Fogle was sent to McNeil at the age of 17 in the 1950s.^[4]

The state of Washington began to lease the facility from the federal government in 1981, and later that year the state department of corrections began moving prisoners into the facility, named "McNeil Island Corrections Center" by the department. The island was deeded to the state government in 1984.^[5]

In November 2010, the department announced its plans to close the penitentiary by 2011, saving $14 million in the process.^[6]

See also

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to McNeil Island Penitentiary.

• "McNeil Island Corrections Center". Washington State Department of Corrections. Archived from the original on August 27, 2010. 
• "McNeil Island Corrections Center History". Washington State Department of Corrections.
• Oppman, Patrick. "Last island prison in U.S. closes". CNN. April 1, 2011.

Washington State Department of Corrections prisons State prisons Airway Heights Corrections Center Cedar Creek Corrections Center Clallam Bay Corrections Center Coyote Ridge Corrections Center Larch Corrections Center Mission Creek Corrections Center for Women♀ Monroe Correctional Complex Olympic Corrections Center Stafford Creek Corrections Center Washington Corrections Center Washington Corrections Center for Women♀ Washington State Penitentiary Closed Ahtanum View Corrections Center McNeil Island Corrections Center Pine Lodge Corrections Center for Women♀ Above facilities are male-only unless noted by ♀(female) or ♂♀ (unisex)

Coordinates: 47°12′54″N 122°41′17″W / 47.21500°N 122.68806°W / 47.21500; -122.68806