Alcatraz Island

When Alcatraz opened as a federal penitentiary in 1934, it offered inmates an unusual luxury: hot showers. But this wasn’t kindness, it was strategy. Prison officials reasoned that prisoners accustomed to steaming water would be less likely to brave the frigid 50-degree Bay waters in an escape attempt. The tactic mostly worked, though it didn’t stop 36 inmates from trying over 29 years. The prison closed in 1963, done in not by daring escapes but by economics: at $10 per prisoner per day, it cost three times more to run than mainland prisons.

None of the fourteen escape attempts that made up those 36 inmates ever produced a confirmed survivor. Twenty-three were recaptured, seven were shot, and at least three drowned; five men, involved in two separate attempts twenty-five years apart, were never accounted for either way. The most famous of them, the 1962 escape dramatized in film, left behind a life vest with teeth marks in the rubber and no bodies. Alcatraz spent three decades being called escape-proof by a prison system that never actually had to prove it. It just had to make the alternative unaffordable.