Walls of Water: These are the most legendary prison islands from which there was and is no escape

Walls made of water are sometimes safer than those made of stone, steel or concrete? especially if they are built additionally. That's probably why islands were designed as perfect prison areas, andthe most legendary prison islandswe have listed here.

Some prison islands are so legendary that they have been used as the setting for novels and films? like the famous film with Clint EastwoodEscape from Alcatraz.

It is probably the most legendary prison island in the whole world: Alcatraz in the Bay of San Francisco. It is about 8.5 hectares in size, about 500 meters long and up to 41 meters high and is about 1.5 km off the mainland. The distance doesn't sound that far, but if you thought you could swim the one and a half kilometers to the mainland after an eruption, you were wrong. Because the water is so cold and the current there is so strong that any attempt to escape was doomed to failure. There were at least 29 escape attempts in total, but none of them were successful. As early as 1861, Alcatraz was used as a prisoner of war camp for captured Confederates during the Civil War and was then converted into a complete prison island in the early 1930s. From 1934 to 1963 it was considered the toughest maximum security prison in the USA, housing the worst criminals. Among them were Al Capone (1934?1939), the violent criminal Robert Franklin Stroud (1942?1959), the real Machine Gun Kelly (1934?1951) and the German spy Erich Gimpel (1945?1955). However, in 1963 the prison was abandoned due to the high operating costs and has been a tourist attraction ever since.

Also very well known is the prison island of Robben Island, an Atlantic island about twelve kilometers off Cape Town and 6.9 km from the nearest mainland section at Bloubergstrand. The island gets its name because the coast is a natural habitat for seals (and also African penguins). It is particularly famous because the famous South African freedom fighter and later President Nelson Mandela was imprisoned there for almost two decades? namely in a four square meter individual cell. Other apartheid fighters were also housed on Robben Island, including Walter Sisulu, Ahmed Kathrada and Robert Sobukwe. Escape from Robben Island was considered as hopeless as from Alcatraz because of the cold water and current. In the mid-1990s, the former prison island was made a natural and national monument and the former prison building was turned into a museum. When Mandela became the first black president of South Africa in 1994, he took eleven of his former fellow prisoners on Robben Island into his government.

The saying that someone should be sent to Rikers or be imprisoned in Rikers is familiar from countless American films. And when a sentence like that is uttered, as a viewer you know: Someone must have really done something wrong, because only the worst criminals are sent to Rikers. The island is located in the East River of New York and is part of the Bronx. There are a total of ten prisons there (holding up to 17,000 people), making Rikers the largest prison complex in the world. Just maintaining Rikers costs the state $860 million annually. Also interesting: around eighty percent of the inmates are drug addicts. Rikers in its current form is scheduled to close in 2026. Instead, new prison complexes are to be built there and the number of inmates is to be reduced to 3,300.

The name of the former prison on the rocky island of Île d?If was called Château d?If, which sounds more like a luxury apartment than a prison. But that's exactly what it was like when it was put into operation as such in the mid-16th century? Even from here it seemed impossible to escape. The former fortress owes its fame less to the prison itself, but rather to the fact that the writer Alexandre Dumas used part of the plot of his novel published in 1844The Count of Monte Cristosettled on the island. This is one of the reasons why the island is now primarily a tourist attraction and can be reached from Marseille within a few minutes.

The Italian Mediterranean island of Gorgona is the smallest of the Tuscan Archipelago in the Tuscany region and is located in the Tyrrhenian Sea, about 34 km from the port city of Livorno. From 1869 onwards, an agricultural penal colony was founded there, whose prisoners still run vegetable gardens, a vineyard and raise livestock there today. Viticulture there is still an important and significant economic factor today.

The Île du Diable, in German: Devil's Island, is located about 13 km off the coast of French Guiana in South America and is the smallest, northernmost and best-known of the three Îles du Salut. It is about 14 hectares in size and rises to a height of up to 40 meters. It became the most famous island primarily because it served as a penal colony for convicted felons and professional criminals between 1852 and 1946. Its most famous inmate was artillery captain Alfred Dreyfus, who served there from 1895 to 1899. However, because the conditions in the prison were inhumane, the colony was closed in the mid-20th century. Also the plot of the autobiographical novelPapillonby Henri Charrière is set on Devil's Island, which was made into a sensational film in 1973 with Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman and is still considered one of the most popular films to this dayapplies. However, the film was shot in Jamaica at the time.

And yes: Germany also has a prison island: Hahnöfersand. This is one of the marsh islands in the Lower Elbe on the banks of the Elbe in Lower Saxony in the immediate vicinity of the Altes Land near Hamburg and is approximately opposite the Schleswig-Holstein town of Wedel. It is around 1,100 meters long, up to 700 meters wide and has an area of ​​approximately 1.6 square kilometers. Although the island is located in Lower Saxony, it has been home to the Hahnöfersand Correctional Facility in the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg for over a hundred years. In 1911 the island was handed over to the Hamburg prison administration, and in 1913 the first prisoners were brought to Hahnöfersand. Their task was to make the soil usable by applying silt and clay. In March 1915 this work was continued by 1,200 Russian prisoners of war. The juvenile detention center was founded in 1920, and in 1997 a closed prison for women was added to the prison complex in two separate buildings. Since 2004, the youth detention center of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg has also been located as a separate new building within the prison complex.