Alcatraz Dock: Prisoners at Work

View of the dock on Alcatraz Island

circa 1911

The Alcatraz Dock was the stepping off point for enlisted soldiers, officers and their families, federal Bureau of Prison employees and their wives and children, notorious federal prisoners, and Native American activists as they arrived on the Rock over the centuries.

Between 1860 and 1960, the U.S. military forced people incarcerated on Alcatraz to use pick and shovel to carve away this twenty-two-acre sandstone rock, and people incarcerated in the federal prison further shaped the island through their labor. From here you can look up and see several cliffs dug out to construct buildings, homes, and gardens. The large building that dominates the dock shows two generations of construction. The lower level's ten-foot-thick brick walls protected cannons and the men who lived behind them during the Civil War. Men incarcerated by the military built the newer, upper concrete block levels, which housed soldiers before being converted to apartments for federal correctional officers and their families.

From what you know and understand about incarceration, should those incarcerated be forced to work? Why, or why not?