My Rock, My Redeemer: Discourses of Family, Violence, and (In)Security on Alcatraz Island, 1934–63

During its tenure as a federal penitentiary, Alcatraz imprisoned 1,576 inmates.  Outside the main cell house, however, the island had other residents.  In the shadow of the prison, penitentiary guards and their families enjoyed spacious apartments, single-family homes, and amenities like a bowling alley, handball court, barber shop, and fishing off the island dock. As one former resident remarked, life on Alcatraz was much like any other neighborhood in America, except “[a]t the top of our neighborhood was a maximum security penitentiary.”  This paper analyzes the dual notions of security and insecurity, as seen through the guards and the families who lived on Alcatraz during its time as a federal penitentiary, from 1934 to 1963. Many of these former Alcatraz residents have expressed, in memoirs and in books of popular history, that life on Alcatraz felt safe: danger was located squarely inside the prison walls or in the urban jungle of San Francisco.  Safety, then, was to be found in the home.  While guards represented stability and security for their families, they elicited just the opposite feeling for those men imprisoned on the island, whose own memoirs describe an environment of brutality and isolation.  This sense of security, experienced by the civilian residents of Alcatraz, then, was built on a foundation of violence.  While living on a fortified island prison may have been a novelty, discourses around safety and danger were not dissimilar to those playing out in the national arena.  In a Cold War era consumed by fear of the unknown, the family came to stand as its own best defense.