McNeil_Island_Corrections_Center
McNeil Island Corrections Center
Prison in Washington state, United States
The McNeil Island Corrections Center (MICC) was a prison in the northwest United States, operated by the Washington State Department of Corrections. It was on McNeil Island in Puget Sound in unincorporated Pierce County,[1] near Steilacoom, Washington.[2]
Opened in 1875, it had previously served as a territorial correctional facility and then a federal penitentiary.[3] 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.[4] 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.[5] Career criminal and novelist James Fogle was sent to McNeil at the age of 17 in the 1950s.[6]
The State of Washington began to lease the facility from the federal government in 1981,[7] and later that year the state department of corrections began moving prisoners into the facility, renamed "McNeil Island Corrections Center." The island was deeded to the state government in 1984.[8]
In November 2010, the department announced its plans to close the penitentiary by 2011, saving $14 million in the process.[9]
