Puneet Varma (Editor)

McNeil Island Corrections Center

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Location
  
McNeil Island

Security class
  
Medium

Opened
  
1875

Phone
  
+1 253-588-5281

Status
  
Closed

Capacity
  
853

Closed
  
2011

McNeil Island Corrections Center

Address
  
88450 Washington St, Steilacoom, WA 98388, USA

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

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. 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. Career criminal and novelist James Fogle was sent to McNeil at the age of 17 in the 1950s.

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.

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

Notable Inmates

  • Nicholas Sands Underground LSD Chemist for Brotherhood of Love (Escaped to Canada, 1973)
  • Alvin Karpis Mass murderer
  • Charles Manson Serial killer, musician
  • Gordon Hirabayashi Resisted Japanese American internment during World War II
  • Mickey Cohen 1930's Los Angeles gang leader
  • Robert Franklin Stroud "The Birdman of Alcatraz"
  • Samuel Bowers Former imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan
  • Vincent Hallinan 1952 Presidential candidate
  • References

    McNeil Island Corrections Center Wikipedia