The Alcatraz Prison was originally a naval defence fort, and it was rebuilt in the early 20th Century as a military prison.
The Department of Justice took it over in the 1930s, and it began taking in convicts from the federal prison system.
Among its more famous inmates were the notorious gangsters Al Capone, Mickey Cohen and George "Machine Gun" Kelly.
The prison was also made famous by the 1962 film, Birdman of Alcatraz, starring Burt Lancaster, about the convicted murderer Robert Stroud, who, while serving a life sentence on the prison island developed an interest in birds and went on to become an expert ornithologist.
It was also the site of the 1996 film The Rock, starring Sean Connery and Nicolas Cage, about a former SAS captain and FBI chemist who rescue hostages from Alcatraz Island.
